The F*ck It Bucket
“Part of me wonders if this agent is going to think I'm crazy. Her other authors are so much more serious than me. But I know I'm not alone in making jokes and awkwardly injecting humor into moments that feel intense. We all do it.”
The kettle chips almost did me in this week. My husband, eating kettle chips, next to me, and I felt something close to murderous over it. Yes, I'm aware that's a personal problem.
That's the theme of the week, honestly. Buckets. I've got three of them right now and they do not play nice together.
There's the Fu*k It Bucket. It took over everything. Working from home with a teenager who sometimes sleeps until noon and sometimes wants to run a marathon by noon (not actually) is exhausting, because mom brain and business brain trying to operate in the same breath is not working well. Rapid-fire questions and demands (zero reciprocated love may I add), and I keep trailing off mid-thought, mid-sentence. Then I get made fun of for being old. Seriously fucking rude, man.
There's the I've Got This Bucket, aka normal work, aka the bucket that's actually fine.
And there's the Book Bucket, which this week meant sitting with the fact that querying agents is basically Where's Waldo, and searching for the right one was making perimenopausal me want to punch a baby.
So I decided I needed a better methodology. I bucketed the agents: Hell Yes, Smart Bet, It's a Reach. Only found one Hell Yes this week. But instead of just checking whether she was open to queries, I actually did my homework. Read the two memoirists closest to my book on her list, both heavy, unflinching, spare-prose. A psych-ward memoir. A trauma memoir in short, economic sentences. Beautifully done. Really dark sh*t though.
And reading them made something click: my book isn't a third entry in that emotional key. If theirs are greyscale, mine's yellow — even the dark chapters. I use comedy as an engine.
In the cancer chapter, a few paragraphs before I get into feeling pissed off, mad at the world, flabbergasted, I say that “my husband is a penetration tester and I will never not find that funny.” The chapter that covers my mom dying starts differently. I open it by talking about the parasite that destroyed my GI tract after coming home from Africa. And I quote “ Godzilla-level stomach hell. Something crawled up in there and died. It came out both ends for almost two weeks.” Talk about Godzilla, sh*t, and death in one chapter, why not.
Part of me wonders if this agent is going to think I'm crazy. Her other authors are so much more serious than me. But I know I'm not alone in making jokes and awkwardly injecting humor into moments that feel intense. We all do it.
I gave myself a homework assignment as a part of doing things right (not that I know sh*t) for this agent. It was to find a character, a TV show, and a color that accurately depict the voice and overall tone of my book.
I landed on Fleabag for the show because of its cynical wit, sexual bravado, fourth-wall-breaking as a defense mechanism for grief, guilt, loneliness. And for a character, I identify with Tina Fey's Liz Lemon in 30 Rock — she's a stressed, neurotic, fiercely independent workaholic who blends Type-A ambition with pure chaos.
If the book was a color, it'd be yellow. Not the greyscale of her other authors. Why, you ask? Because even in the dark chapters and moments, I infuse humor.
I put the homework assignment answers above into the query letter. Unconventional, yes. But hopefully it's winning.
I also spent this morning on a 2.0 version of the proposal that I still don't love. But the query's out. One down.
Quality over quantity. Hoping like hell it works.
MANUSCRIPT STATS
📈 ~62k words. Chapter 8 is actually back in the manuscript now, not just found.
📄 Proposal 2.0: built. Still don't love it. Built anyway.
🎯 Queries 9, Rejections 3, Becca 0. The scoreboard is not in my favor yet.
🔁 Manuscript swap: still owe him a read. It's on the list.
👀 Next: hit the bucket list. Keep it up.
