Query help: How to control your queries
- BEFORE YOU QUERY:
A) Control your queries by not querying assholes/unethical agents.
Researching agents isn’t just about finding your dream matchups, your solid matches and your “this would be okay”s.
It’s also about finding out who’s an asshole or incompetent — or both. Maybe an agent resigned rather than being expelled from a prestigious association for agents. Being called a slumlord … isn’t good. Neither is this.
When you research agents, you’ll find some have accolades and more. You’ll also find some have been accused of awful things, or have dropped their client lists with no notice, or have gone months without communicating, or have stolen manuscripts, or require you to sign with them immediately if they offer, or require you to pay them for editing before they’ll work with you.
Some agents have practices that are legal and ethical but that might cross a line, such as requiring that you query only them (aka an exclusive submission). This transfers the power in the situation from you — who could otherwise query a hundred agents at once (but don’t) — to them. Then there’s chronological exclusivity: I’m told one agent will not request materials off a query unless he receives that query during business hours.
At a fundamental level, if you have an issue with an agent’s approach to querying, don’t query them. After all, agents can’t email you with this:
“Hi. Your manuscript was sent by a friend. YOU SHOULD HAVE QUERIED ME! I will now take control of your literary career. If you attempt to sign with someone else, I’ll have you blacklisted. You won’t even be able to publish haikus on Amazon.
So sign. Or die, basically.
Sincerely,
Jane Agent”
Bottom line, do the research and hope for the best.
B) Control your queries by querying agents who want your specific book.
Some agents say they are hunting for marginalized voices, and then list BIPOC, queer, neurodiverse and several other marginalizations.
And some aren’t intentional, noting only that they want a “good book.”
Now, let’s say you’re me a year (I hooooope only a year) from now. You’ve written a ludicrously queer ya detective story, and you’re researching agents. One of the things you want to avoid is an agent who will say, “Why queer?”
That is the two-word question a friend faced as she was defending her dissertation.
She is queer.
The person who asked “Why queer?” is straight.
(My answer, when I learned of the question: Because queer.)
There are people who understand why we need books full of marginalized people not being opposed on the basis of their marginalization.
There are people who do not.
There are people who understand that marginalized people travel in packs.
There are people who do not.
There are people who will read a first chapter with fourteen queer teenagers, several of whose pronouns are they/them, and rejoice.
There are people who will not.
There are people who will read a book in which fourteen queer teenagers are already out and say thank fuck this isn’t another coming out story with religious oppression as its plot.
There are people who will not.
And there are people who represent a dozen queer books that have won Lambda Literary awards.
There are people who do not.
In January 2021, I came up with an idea for a queer newsletter. A queer co-worker and I developed it (40+ hours of work) to the point where the CEO, who is queer, said yes this looks good to me go get it past the goalie.
The task of getting it past the goalie was given to a straight woman. She told me to sit back and let her do the job.
In the time since that happened:
- That queer co-worker has resigned for unrelated reasons (she needed to focus more on her other job).
- Two Valentine’s Days have passed.
- I have been almost outed to my department by a second straight woman.
- A different company has launched a semi-similar product.
So when I talk extensively about intentionality, it’s not because I like being pessimistic. It’s because I’m not trying to spend my time pursuing a business relationship with someone who isn’t trying to get my book in her inbox.
Now, go right ahead and insist that’s not fair. But it takes ten seconds to type “I am seeking stories from BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, neurodiverse and other marginalized creators.” If you don’t have ten seconds to tell me you want my book rather than “a good book” or “an adventure book” or whatever, that tells me how much you want me.
The same advice applies (but to a lesser extent, I think) to people querying clifi, ballet, or anything else with a strong and semi-niche thematic element. You want someone who’s looking for your book. And yeah, maybe you’ll get rejected while having all seven elements that agent is looking for. I see stuff like that here every week. And maybe you will get an instant full request from that “looking for a good book” agent. But to the extent you can get an agent rooting for you from the words “Alan saunters into ballet class these days” (which, to be clear, doesn’t begin a query I’ve worked), good.
C) Control your queries by making sure you don’t fall prey to scams/vanity presses.
Anyone who says you need to pay them to get published is a scammer, from the agent who says you need $400 worth of editing to the publisher who says they keep the royalties from the first 200 sales “to recoup this small portion of our massive investments.”
In fact, a word on that rhetoric: First, even $.50 in royalties owed to you is your money. If it’s such a “small portion,” the publisher won’t miss it and thus can give it to you because you’ve earned it. Second, the publisher’s job is to shell out the “massive investments.” Anyone who doesn’t want to incur that cost should get out of publishing. But by framing the situations as “small portion” and “massive investment,” the publisher is attempting to A) minimize money it is taking from people who did work and B) make its effort look huge by comparison (and maybe even shame anyone who wants their money). And maybe the investment is massive. But it’s also the job. Again, publishing a book comes with known costs.
In general, when people who are trying to prey on you use minimizing-you/maximizing-them language, they are trying to shame you into shutting up or make you feel like they’re doing a massive service for you — and, again, get you to shut up — when in fact, all they’re doing is the job because again, publishing a book comes with cost. Going into the business with an eye toward limiting that cost is smart. But taking authors’ royalties to recoup that expected cost is predatory.
In traditional publishing, the money should flow to you, not away from you — even temporarily. Any agent or other publishing professional (aside from freelance editors not tied to publishing houses or agencies, or freelance editors who firewall their freelancing from their regular work) who tries to change that situation in their favor is a scam artist at best, and you should run like fuck away from them.
D) Control your queries by not spending too much time on one query.
Preface for this section: Everything I am discussing here is legal and accepted in business communities worldwide. (Whether all of it should be is another matter. I expect to get angry emails about this because I expect Very Important People to be in their Very Important Feelings, but everything I’m saying is true and backed by research, experience and common sense.)
Backstory: At a fundamental level, there’s a truth a lot of you don’t realize about custom query documents, query forms and their questions, etc.: They value the agent’s time at the expense of yours.
Imagine that you’ve applied for a job that requires you to fill out four years of job history by hand. Or maybe it requires you to type it all in. In either case, you have to spend an hour inputting information. And no, you can’t just hand your resume over. You have to use the company’s official system thingy. Some official system thingies will input your resume, then botch the effort to fill out fields, leaving you to type your employer name where the system thought Nov or “ was the key detail to grab. So while we need better technology for this, we have companies with a glut of … curved television screens nobody asked for.
Anyway. When you’re done spending an hour filling out that company’s exclusive resume software (as opposed to another company’s, or another’s), the recruiter glances at — kidding! The software scans it for keywords and job durations because the recruiter’s time is more important than that. After that, if you’ve optimized your resume for software (yes, really), a recruiter might glance at the information and conclude either that you’re flighty and unable to stay in one place for more than a year (which is, or was, a corporate standard) or not. Based on data you spent an hour inputting.
The same concept explains why ATMs were invented, (part of) why the frozen food industry exists and why we have so many (and yet … not?) congressional staffers but so few members of Congress: to save “important” people time. (In the case of Congress, that time is spent begging donors for money. Your member of Congress factually can’t meet with you because he (mostly) is calling rich people and asking them for money. More on congressional bullshit later.)
Anyway. Would you like a great example of how I know this? Presenting: my checklist! I have read more than 1,400 initial query drafts, and I have gotten a fantastic sense for what crucial information is missing, so I have made a guide asking writers to ensure they’ve included it so I don’t have to spend my time telling them to do the literary equivalent of wiping their asses after they take a dump. Again, please understand this key fact: I have made my resources free and public to save myself time because telling 1,400 writers, individually, “you need to include genre” was inhaling my life. I spent more than a hundred hours of my time on that checklist and other resources last year, and I’m still adding resources as I find more ways to save myself time — because conservatively, spending that hundred hours saved me four hundred more. If I’d had to do this manually? Fuggedaboudit.
In the same way I put allllll this information out there so querying writers can check it out and leave me alone to bill $50-$100/hour for higher-level work, automated query forms exist so the recipient can be left alone to bill for higher-level work, which means the querying writers uses their time instead. (Emails. I’m expecting emails.)
I don’t even object to the forms conceptually: They save querying writers time by removing from us the need to research the order an agent likes things to be in.
But … the question fields:
“If your main character’s first grade teacher were stuck on the Rock of Gibraltar with a pez dispenser and four copies of the first Batman comic, where would they look for religious/spiritual/other motivation, and how has that shaped your main character’s motivation and your book’s climax? (Answer for each main character; substitute equivalent of first grade teacher if your book world lacks schools.)”
These questions:
i) inhibit query-spamming by weeding out the people who don’t care enough to answer them.
ii) save the agent/their assistant/a poorly or unpaid intern money by removing from them the need to read the pages to get a sense for how well the writer knows their character.
But they also weed out the people who can’t with them. So I suggest that when you’re researching an agent, you include the amount of time you anticipate spending on their submission package. If they ask 14 questions nobody else asks, or if they require that you tailor a document to them by e.g. spending a third of it talking about yourself, or if they require that you mail your package to them, consider not querying them because you can use your time more wisely than that. After all, three hours on one custom query is three hours on probably at least five and potentially fifteen less custom queries. Is that one agent five-plus times more likely to rep/sell your book than any other agent? (But my emails!)
But let’s say you think that agent is just that amazing, or the questions seem easy enough. You rabbit-hole them. And eventually you feel your thinking slipping. You look at the time.
You’ve been doing this for two hours.
Do you stop, or do you keep going? Consider the sunk cost fallacy, which explains why people pursue bad ideas after they’ve devoted unrecoverable resources to them. And consider not falling prey to that fallacy by abandoning that work in favor of something more fruitful, such as querying three agents in one hour instead of one agent in one hour.
That example is part of why I don’t query people who require that you write a document only for them. For example, anyone who requires me to come up with a marketing plan for my book can pound sand. I’m not a marketer. I’m a writer. Marketers market. Writers write.
Once you’ve decided whom to query, based on how good you think they’d be for your career and how onerous their requirements are, you’re ready to …
2. AS YOU’RE QUERYING:
A) Control your queries by not spamming the world with them.
You get one chance per project per agent per six months, and that’s if you edit it heavily between queries. So instead of querying fifty agents in a tranche, do five. Ten. If you get no requests over the ensuing month (assuming your target agents respond that fast), maybe do ten more. But this notion that 100 rejections in a year is an unmitigated achievement … I envy the people who have the time to revise materials and research agents/publishing houses enough for that to mean more than spinning the same wheel and getting the same result — because if you’re not revising along the way (improving) or getting requests (succeeding) or asking in relevant places (targeting), then …
One of my favorite success stories is the person who came to me having gotten no requests in 39 queries. We worked together for a few hours, she took the revised query to an agent, and she got a partial request. Another person came to me after going 0-for-18. Got a full. Another, 0–12. His next set of 12, courtesy of me, included three partial requests.
All of those people succeeded because they revised after getting rejected. Learn from them. Become them.
B) Control your queries by understanding how shitty your odds are.
Prepandemic, a good query request rate was 30 percent, which meant 70 percent of your queries would fail because that’s the business. But the pandemic (and industry changes I might most charitably call unnecessarily destructive to decent people) has nerfed that 30 percent. Now 5 to 10 percent is good.
5 percent is a chunk(ish) above the chances that a random man and a random woman who ovulates will get pregnant if they have sex once a day for five days in a row (20 percent chance each month, and those five days might not be fertile, so (5/30)/5=.0333).
But before sex makes babies, it makes fun. I don’t know anyone who queries for fun. So you have to want to do it. You have to decide to fill out forms whose readers will reject you 90 percent of the time. Even getting approved for disability on your first try is more likely than getting one request in ten queries.
One hit in 10 is roughly on par for getting elected to Congress — the data is mixed. 10 percent is on the high end for defeating a House member —big factors including district makeup, election year and party. A socialist trying to win a district that’s been red since the late Bob Dole was in diapers will face some headwinds, but other seats are more vulnerable.
If you want to get into Congress, the best odds I’ve found are to wait for a seat to open up and for the president (belonging to the same party) to not be on the ballot: Dating back to 1954, 58 percent of challengers to nominees (rather than incumbents) have won.
Getting back to shitty odds: 5 percent is a little shy of the odds that a coin you flip will land heads-up four times in a row: (1/2)⁴=1/16=6.25 percent.
One other thing about 5 percent: That’s higher than the odds (2 percent) you’ll get an agent from a Twitter pitch event. Of the 450ish successful queries in my compendium, just eight come from a Twitter pitch event. And no, my compendium doesn’t have every successful query, nor do I have every successful Twitter pitch. But the raw math on things isn’t hard: There aren’t that many Twitter pitch events. There’s a lot of cold querying. Ergo, most successful queries will be sent cold rather than because of Twitter.
Let’s end this section with a little hope: Remember, in querying at all, you’re among the 3 percent of people who finish writing a book. You’ve already beaten the odds once. Maybe you can do it a second time.
C) Control your queries by deciding to send queries at good times.
Above, I mentioned an agent who rejects queries that are sent outside of business hours. I wouldn’t query that agent because the query is ready to send when I say it’s ready. And I recommend that you adopt that mindset, which several of my clients have adopted — successfully.
But you need more than a ready submission package. You need a ready you. Ideally, you should be neither tired nor hungry, sick, angry — any state of mind or body in which you might make an unforced bad decision. That’s because of two things:
i) Illness and other bad things cause stress, and stress leads to bad decisions.
ii) Exhaustion and other glucose-draining phenomena lead to bad decisions too, says decision science.
So if you can wait until you have time during which you can focus well, do so. If you can’t wait, you know you can’t. Many people are always tired, hungry, sick or something else, so we (yes, hi, hello) have developed a sense of what we can do well/okayishly/at all with whatever energy we have. We also know what will take us into “I can’t” land.
D) Control your queries by setting up a querying ritual.
First, you should have a query-only email, and it should not be set up to make any of your devices ding or vibrate or play this song. That’s because if it can’t make anything ding, it can’t not make anything ding, which means no news is no news, not bad news.
From there, things get situational. For example, maybe you establish a ritual in which you query only after 10 p.m. because that’s when your kids are sedated, which means you can focus. Maybe you drink out of a special query mug or put on special query slippers. Maybe you smile because half of Americans have a book idea, but you’re among the 3 percent who wrote the thing.
Regardless of your query ritual’s other elements, glucose should be one of them. That’s because even if you start your process feeling refreshed, all those decisions and keystrokes — and the emotion of sending a query after a year (or however long) of writing the book — will ruin your brain. And decision science says glucose can help unruin it:
A 2010 study in Psychological Science supports this theory. Researchers found that an uptick in circulating blood glucose corresponds with savvier financial decisions. And a just-released paper from an American and South Korean research team linked glucose depletion with poorer decision-making. When people sipped a glucose-rich drink — sugary lemonade — they used “more deliberative thinking processes” than people who’d sipped a drink without sugar. “We hypothesize that ingestion of sugar provides the body with glucose as fuel for the brain,” the authors of that study write.
Whatever your glucose source, decide it beforehand — and, for bonus points, consider eating the same thing every time so it becomes part of a reward system. When I work submission packages, I eat frozen fruit. We never had the stuff when I was a kid, so I associate it with success and wealth and happiness, and the glucose helps me power through endless oceans of nouns. Another thing I use when I can is rest, since decision science says to:
An additional situational antecedent related to time of day and blood glucose levels implicated in the development of decision fatigue is physiological fatigue. Specifically, sleep deprivation and physiological fatigue are implicated in impaired decision-making (Harrison & Horne 2000).
Rest comes in a few forms. I recommend eye rest and screen breaks. Adding them to your routine might grow it to something like this once you have your submission materials ready:
Put on query slippers. Put on query pajamas. (Hide query pajamas from kids because otherwise I promise unknown liquids will crustify them and/or they will be requisitioned when kids play family, which is also known as “get all the things [names for parents] use, put them in the same room, and color on/spill something on/ruin them in some other way.”) Eat some frozen fruit. Drink a bit of hot chocolate. Rest your eyes. Submit a query. Record the time you submitted it. Eat more, drink more, rest eyes more, submit second query, record time. Repeat process until five queries.
Now, why do you want to have everything ready before you query? Because every decision takes glucose, and anything you haven’t prepared is something you could more easily get wrong. To have query-submitting time be for only submitting queries and not for completing queries as well, you might have query-writing sessions every day at your normal writing time, and then have your query-submitting time at that time every Wednesday, or whatever. Make sure you’re warm, too. In general, you want the environment for querying to be as familiar as possible, though with that new ritual — which is more meant to envelop you in self-care and agency than anything else. My only goal here is to help you find ways to be comfortable. And there’s science behind all of it. We want all the science we can get, considering the math: Sending five queries means, at a 5 percent request rate, more than a 75 percent chance you get five rejections — if you get anything.
One thing I recommend against doing is buying a physical querying journal, which you can lose easily, and which your toddler can dunk in the toilet and say “joowaah foat!” (journal float)
“But you can lose a mug too! Or it can break! or — ”
You can’t drink out of a digital mug. You can record query results in a digital document, and you can’t spill anything on it or lose it or have it smudge and obscure important information. (Sorry not sorry to the person who slapped a cover on a journal and called it a query journal and is selling it for $8 or whatever.)
E) Control your queries by embracing logic, calm and a few tricks.
In your first query-submitting session, you won’t be dealing with agent feedback. But in your next such session, you likely will be. For this part of the process, I recommend a trick: Focus not on the response but on the time it was submitted. By lessening the focus on rejection, you infuse yet more agency into a process in which people you don’t know are shaping your publishing and personal future in ways you can’t control. Another thing you can consider is not using the word rejection. Instead, if you get something you identify here as nonspecific feedback, consider typing “form” in your query-tracking spreadsheet. By focusing on when you got the feedback and the fact that it wasn’t specific, you’re removing some of the rejection from the rejection. You’re also asserting your place in the writing community by validating the data and experiences of other writers. And you’re avoiding having the word “rejection” autofill in your spreadsheet. And if you keep form lowercase and have PARTIAL! uppercase and with an exclamation point, it will look distinct and rewardlike in your tracking mechanism — even like shouting, which is a bit like announcing to the world that YOU DID THE THING! In a country in which only 3 percent of people write the book and only 5 percent of queries get a request, you’ve done something only 3 people in 2,000 have done. That’s like being the only person in a packed, 4,000-square-foot ballroom to win an award.
Additionally, I recommend that if you’re checking query results and sending queries in the same query session, you decide beforehand that if you get x result, you’ll send y more queries, but if you get z result, you won’t. Maybe type that promise to yourself in your digital query spreadsheet. Then, no matter what asterisk you want to place by the promise because technically neither x nor z happened, abide by the spirit of your promise.
Now, as part of your ritual, how often should you be checking results?
i) After you load your query results, you should not press F5 unless an agent just told you she was sending you a pages request. That’s because the odds that an agent sent you a request in the four seconds after you opened your email or tracker account, compared to the odds that the agent did so in the many more time units between when you closed that account in your last session and reopened it in this session, are very bad. Also, checking for results already gives agents control. You want to be the one in control, so check once and that’s it.
I realize this advice is extremely hard to take. I realize it will cause anxiety in the beginning. I think in the long run, it is a good idea for both that anxiety and general mental health.
ii) Unless the agents you’ve queried are known for replying in only a few days, I recommend checking results once a week. That might seem like nineteen cretaceous periods in query world, but again, in checking your query results, you are giving agents control over your querying and publishing future. That’s a bad idea.
You wrote a book. You are giving them an opportunity to represent you. Without writers, agents have nothing. They need our books.
3. AFTER YOU’VE QUERIED:
A) Control your queries by researching more agents and preparing more queries.
The bulk of the query success stories I’ve read involve writes querying at least several dozen agents — 60, 100. So whether you’re looking at how many deals they’ve made over the past year in your genre and age range or looking at how they prefer to be addressed in queries, you have some work to do for each agent. Because understand this: You can, in your first tranche of queries, get five full requests. Your next tranche can be the same, and so on.
And all of those full requests can end in ghosting.
You’re not done querying until you have an offer you like, and even then, if that relationship sours, you might need to part ways with that agent (here’s how to say you did so) and get back to querying.
B) Control your queries by understanding how you can control the request process.
Among the bad things that can happen when you’re querying are: i) you learn an agent did a thing you’d rather not associate with and ii) you are referred to an agent you didn’t research.
In the former case, you might give the agent a day to reflect on that incident and apologize or explain. Here’s why:
The science does say impulsivity isn’t wrong and that you’ll regret decisions made only if you think choosing quickly is bad (PDF, page 6):
“[I]t is not the feeling of rushing per se that is crucial in producing regret, but rather the subjective experience of choosing quickly combined with the lay theory that choosing quickly is bad.”
But sometimes, something looks worse than it is, and giving an agent time to explain why, e.g., they secured a book deal for an insurrectionist can help avoid the awkwardness of pulling a query only to unpull it when you learn the proceeds from the sale will go to the slain police officer’s family.
If, on the other hand, the proceeds are going where they normally go and the agent says she supports some aspect of the misinformation that led to the fatal insurrection, that might be a good reason to pull the query. In a similar vein, I don’t anticipate querying anyone who’s on Parler.
In the case of a referral to someone you didn’t consider, what do you do?
First, you have the absolute right to not have your work considered by any agent. This is a business, not that thing where you have to give birthday party invitations to every classmate, even the one who tries to wipe boogers on you. But you can back out of the querying process with any agent at any time. Nothing is final until you’ve signed a contract, and you can cancel that contract.
When I asked a friend about getting a request from an agent you hadn’t considered, she urged me to consider honoring the request because the only way to get a true feel for an agent’s i) vision for your book, ii) personality and work style and iii) anything else is to talk to them, and that’s generally going to happen only during a call.
In the above example, where I highlighted intentional agents versus “good book agents,” an agent who doesn’t look friendly might turn out to be fantastic. Maybe that agent has connections to queer media and has a queer son but doesn’t talk about any of that because it’s not her style. Maybe she has so few queer books because she’s been in the business for forty years and she doesn’t take many new clients, so her list reflects publishing’s history of heterosexism.
C) Control your queries by controlling your response.
You never need to respond to a rejection. At most, if you get an R&R, you might take time to process the response and decide (once you’ve had glucose, eye rest and calming time) what you want to do.
Second, of the 450 successful queries I’ve read, only one did not get rejected. So statistically, you are going to get rejected.
A rejection doesn’t mean your book is bad. A rejection doesn’t mean you’re a bad writer. A rejection doesn’t mean you’ve failed. A rejection means that at the moment the agent rejected you, that agent didn’t want your book as represented by your submission package.
Maybe the agent just sold four like it and needs to see how they do. Maybe the agent isn’t right for your voice and another agent is. Maybe, as is the case with a client recently, you’re two deleted paragraphs away from being where you need to be.
Maybe you still need to level up.
If you query twenty agents who represent your genre and age range and you get nothing after two months, ask for help. I have closed to extensive revisions on unsolicited queries, but I still give free first passes, and my resources page can help with some things. On that page is a link to a directory of successful queries in your genre and age range, plus others.
The most important thing you can do in a query is be clear. Genre and age range are missing from so many queries it’s like people don’t know they exist. From there, too many queries’ pitches start with a mash of worldbuilding details. The tiny problem with this is people buy books for the characters, not the worlds. In The Hunger Games, you’re rooting for a fatherless archer to kill assassins. In The Chronicles of Narnia, you’re rooting for children who are trying to survive one war to also survive another. Now, the world can inform what the character faces, but at a fundamental level, if a lost Chronicles book was found showing what happened between The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, your first question would probably be about Lucy or Aslan, not the recently thawed ground. So start the pitch with the character and a verb — what they’re doing. And then march with that character and your verbs all the way to the stakes sentence. It doesn’t have to be the most exciting stuff. It just has to be clear and consistent to the character, showing them struggling internally and/or externally.
And then, if your response to twenty form rejections or twenty silences is a re-edited query that now gives genre and age range and shows your character struggling against their world rather than a world your character exists in, you’ve won.
D) Control your queries by living your life, as opposed to living and dying with every query update.
Eat. Sleep. Have sex. Work on another book. Take up a hobby a character has so you can write it more authentically. But whatever you do, have that activity fill your brain and heart so you’re not thinking about those five or ten queries that could have turned into one full request or ten form rejections (or ten silences).
On the day I got married, I woke up more nervous than I’d been since one awful high school morning. My now-wife and I had been sharing a bed for close to a year, but to appease her parents, she’d spent that night with them instead.
With her had gone my alarm clock.
I have always had problems waking up on time. I almost had to repeat a class in high school because of it. And I was terrified that I’d wake up after the wedding was to have started. (In retrospect, I’m pretty sure someone would have come for me, but anxiety and logic aren’t always on speaking terms.)
That morning, I did wake up on time. And I woke up as nervous as I’ve ever been. I was convinced something would go wrong — that I would, at long last, be denied this nice thing I’d thought I was getting for months. And nothing would quell my anxiety. Lacking any other reasonable option, I went to my parents’ hotel room. My mother was a math teacher, and she was having trouble teaching shapes to her students. So for a few minutes, we played with yarn as a way to teach diameter, side, length — basic geometric concepts.
Or, to reframe things: For a few minutes, I chose to do something unrelated to my wedding anxiety. And it lessened.
A core underpinning of all my query advice — here, on my resources page, in my Twitter account — is that we writers should reclaim and retain control of ourselves wherever we can, whether in querying or in life generally. The more we can do so, the happier we’ll be.
Good luck <3