Cut the Tension with a Butterknife, B*tches
What I actually want for this book, underneath the deadlines, agent research, and the question of whether anyone wants it. Is a reader that closes it and thinks, life is hard as f*ck. It smacks you in the face sometimes. And sometimes you don't have the answers, or know what the hell you’re really after. That's okay.
I swear to Jesus I am not bipolar. Maybe just hormonally imbalanced. But the fricken' rude thing is, after breast cancer, no one will touch me with a ten-foot pole if the words Hormone Replacement Therapy are mentioned.RUDE.
I digress.
My emotions have been an erratic rollercoaster for real though, and I feel for my stinking hubby. Between my hormones (or lack thereof) and a teenage girl in the house, tense is a GD understatement. It wouldn't take more than a butterknife to cut the tension around here. And a dull one at that.
Saturday hubs and I took the boat out. He fished, caught one cute little bass, I munched on Cheetos and Skittles and read. For a few hours, nobody needed anything from me. Thank you sweet baby Jesus.
Throughout the week, it felt like it was one of incompletion, where you're working towards projects being done, but nothing got finished. It felt really infuriating and enraging, because what I was working on was good (or so I thought).
I had a client call where the feedback landed harder than I expected. Not a you suck Becca, do better, just hard. It always stings when you pour your heart into something and get handed back notes and commentary that reruns in your head like a broken record. Instead of positives. Feed me and tell me I’m pretty is much nicer (even if it’s not always realistic).
I put in the work all damn week and NOTHING came to fruition, and everything took so much longer than I wanted it to. Felt that with the writing too.
Which brings me to the query letters, or lack thereof.
Zero submitted this week. I know. But I spent real time on one, researching an agent whose list is mostly YA and rom-coms, and a request for memoirs that read with the intrigue of a novel. Went looking for a memoir she'd actually sold to a publisher. Came up empty. First instinct: wrong agent, wrong fit, move on. Second instinct: maybe she just hasn't found the right memoir yet. Going with the second one.
What I actually want for this book, underneath the deadlines, agent research, and the question of whether anyone wants it. Is a reader that closes it and thinks, life is hard as f*ck. It smacks you in the face sometimes. And sometimes you don't have the answers, or know what the hell you’re really after. That's okay. What's not okay is sitting on the couch eating Cheetos with a big ass glass of wine day after day, feeling bad for yourself, and never bringing those dreams to life because of the uncertainty.
I left corporate. Cage uno. Started my own business, which became cage numero dos. If it's a visual metaphor, it's a bird cage. I left the first one and all I did was fly to a prettier one. It's working. It also doesn't light a fiery passion up in me. I'm working on that.
The book is the process of opening and closing these cage doors, told through the vulnerable lens of Becca, with humor sprinkled throughout so the sh*t doesn't seem as deep. My prayer is that it meets my readers where they need it to. Spoiler alert: I write you all letters throughout the manuscript, to help you find yourselves in the words.
That's why I'm doing this painstaking, slow, incomplete-query-letter process. In hopes that it lands on the right readers' Kindle, or the words play in their ears on a long walk via Audible. This will be reality eventually.
MANUSCRIPT STATS
🎯 Queries 9, Rejections 3, Becca 0. The scoreboard is not in my favor yet.
📨 Query #10 in progress, about to go out
🔁 Manuscript swap: 3 chapters down
🙏 The prayer stands: that this book hits the right readers and blesses the crap out of them.
