My first rounds of submissions were to agents who took only query letters and accepted them over email. (I discovered agents usingquerytracker.com and agentquery.com – both of which are excellent resources.) There’s a lot of agents in the market that will take queries this way, but a greater number of agents want a lot more things – items beyond the query letter – cheif among them is the synopsis.

So I spent a better part of my weekend working on the synopses for Coal Belly. Synopses. Not one but two of them, a long one which was about 2000 words and 10 pages double spaced and a much shorter one which is 2 pages single spaced and around 800 words. The challenge of taking 130k words and reducing them to 2000 words was difficult, however, the smaller one, stripping it down even further to 2 pages was one of the more difficult things I have done in this whole process. Stripping away the flourishes and focusing on the structure, but still trying to maintain pace and hooking the reader. Tough.

I learned a lot.

Now… to send it out.