No from Kathi J. Paton, no from just about all the agents who were queried (and took the time to respond). The query letter is another dismal failure, or the story is not shining in its best light, or the plot doesn't sound fresh and new.
I should have re-worked the query, but I've been entirely pre-occupied with the current Work In Progress. That's the only story that's in my head right now, taking up all the literary brain cells, and the desire to compose a brilliant query for some other novel is totally lacking.
With the arrival of August, the college interns return to their school's literary journals and begin to accept submissions again. So much easier to send a short story, no query required, and there are scores of magazines out there to try. It's productive work, trying to get some credentials to put before the agents. I mean, would Leigh Feldman have looked at Wayne Caldwell's Cataloochee if he hadn't published a few short stories first?
And then there's my conviction that the newest manuscript is better than all the others that went before, improvements evident in writing and overall construction. Why waste my time querying on the old stuff when there's something new in the works that will definitely get an agent's attention?
That is the voice of hope, crying in the wilderness of the unpublished.
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