In My Day...

A lot of you know that The Body Finder wasn't my first book. I was practically a baby when I finished my first manuscript, a full-on horror novel that actually landed me a real-live, honest-to-goodness agent. Or at least someone with business cards who passed as an agent.

Seriously, though, things have changed A LOT since I wrote that first novel:

1) When I first started writing my Horror Masterpiece at the ripe old age of nineteen, I was writing on an old-fashioned electric typewriter. The kind where if you made a mistake you had to unscroll the paper, uncap your white-out, and wait for it to dry before starting again. No computers for us, we were real writers...with the paper cuts to prove it.

I remember getting my first word processor. It was ENORMOUS! And awesome!!! It had this tiny little screen with dot-matrix letters, but I could type my entire manuscript and store it on a floppy disk before printing it out. It was like I'd died and gone to editing heaven.

2) I didn't have agentquery.com. Or the internet at all. I spent hours and hours...and hours...scouring through the pages of The Writer's Market, highlighting agents (and publishers) that would consider both first-time authors AND horror novels.

Again, more paper cuts...

3) Email? What is this E-M-A-I-L you speak of??? We had good old fashioned Snail Mail. Always. No instant gratification for us. I would mail my query letter and wait for days. Weeks. Months, maybe.

Okay, maybe that part's not so different.

4) I couldn't cyber-stalk anyone. I couldn't check the Twitter/Facebook/blogs of the agents and editors I was waiting on to see if their status updates had changed. I couldn't look to see if they'd posted an update that they were reading "the scariest book ever written" by a new author they were planning to "pluck out of obscurity". I couldn't read what they'd eaten for lunch. They were on the East Coast and I was on the West Coast...and there was nothing but a good old-fashioned plane ride to bridge that gap.

So, what hasn't changed? In all the years between my doomed horror novel and today, there are a lot of things that have stayed the same:

1) Like I said before, agents and editors still make you wait. They're buried in those e-queries and submissions, and the wait-time doesn't seem to have changed a whole heck of a lot.

2) Query letters are hard. You need to find that balance between professional and not-boring, stand-out and not-cheesy. Basically, you need to knock their socks off...or at least keep them from nodding off.

3) You want to make sure your manuscript is in its best possible shape. You want a tight, finely tuned draft. You want it as error-free as possible. You want drama/action/intrigue/romance...whatever it is that will keep a reader's attention. You want show-not-tell. Make sure it's ready before submitting.

Because...

4) Publishing is still tough. After all these years, that much still hasn't changed. It's tough, tough, tough.

Even the internet couldn't change that.