REJECTED!

Hey all, so the last time I posted, I’d finished writing The Black Vale, finished editing it and was working on a summary. Both what I’d put on the back of a book and what I was going to send in to TOR.  So I came up with a good one for the back of the book, and its way better than the one I posted in my previous blog. But it took me forever to finish the summary for TOR.

So, I’ve had a lot of people ask me, “When can I buy it?”

Logically…I have no idea. I chose to send it to TOR first because what fantasy author doesn’t dream of having TOR’s little mountain on the spine of their book? Also, they only take unsolicited submissions, meaning that you can’t have sent it to anyone else first.

Well, writing up the summary wasn’t easy. It took me over 500 pages to tell the story, so how do I sum it up in only 10 pages??? And that’s double-spaced, my friends. So my Best friend, Diane, and I have been working on this summary since my last post, which I believe was last year (I know, I’m not an amazing blogger. I just have so much to do all the time…). We tried and tried to make it work before finally deciding to just sum up every chapter in one or two sentences. She started from the beginning and I started from the end. Once we met up in the middle, we put it together…and it was still too long! So we spent the next month or two hammering it out and cutting more and more until it felt like it was nothing. But it was 10 pages. Finally.

That wasn’t all we had to cut up though. TOR asks for the first three chapters but it also has a maximum word count so we had to chop up my first three chapters to make them fit. But alas, after so many months of fighting through it and painfully chopping my book to pieces to it fit into TOR’s submission guidelines, I put it in the mail. Diane was there taking pictures and afterwards we went to Wal-Mart to buy a frame for my inevitable rejection letter. Then we celebrated with wine and cheese J

The wait was on. TOR says they get so many submissions each month that it could take up to 6 months to get back to someone on a submission. So I certainly didn’t expect to hear back from them in only two weeks! But hear back I did.

I opened my mailbox and found the pre-addressed envelope that I’d sent with my proposal with the New York, NY stamp across the stamp(Yes, they stamped the stamp, I know it sounds odd). Well, I knew what it was. No one gets accepted the first time. Especially when they’re previously unpublished. So I opened it up and sure enough, REJECTED!!

So, only two weeks. My guess is that they opened the envelope, read the cover letter that made it obvious that I’m previously unpublished, and shredded the rest.

Am I mad about this? No. Not at all. Like I said, I knew this would happen. I prepared for it. I bought the frame and now had something to fill it. Do I have any hard feelings towards TOR. Hell no! I still love em! Besides, more than half my collection of first edition hard covers has TOR’s little mountain on the spines. They’ll take me some day.

But for now, I think self-publishing is the best way to advertise myself and make myself look good for those big publishers. I thought of sending it to others, but most of them require an agent. Well, I’ve had agents before and they all were about as useful as—be nice Leah!

…Excuse me. I’m sure agents are very useful to some people. But I think I’ll just cut out that middle man for now and self-publish. I can put into action some of those great self-marketing tips I learned at LTUE this year J

On that note, I did meet up with David Farland at LTUE. Yeah, he didn’t remember me at all. That was a little disappointing. I guess I need to work on those first impression skills that I so fantastically suck at. That and I know he and his family suffered a tragedy involving his son that is burying them in hospital bills so obviously he had other things on his mind that were far more important than meeting an aspiring, unpublished writer in Barnes and Noble who didn’t even have a good pitch.

On another note, my short story, Flight of the Raven, did take first place in the Dragon Comet Short Story Contest at LTUE. That was an adrenalin rush! I was my sister Dawn and Diane, sitting at a table, eating dinner at the banquet, listening to an AMAZING speech by Tracy Hickman (a speech that someone ripped a loud fart right in the middle of. Seriously, who does that??). After his speech, they announced the winners of the contests. First they did the children’s, then the adults. I was crossing my fingers. Third place would be great, really.  But someone else took that. So I started twitching, Second place? Nope. Someone else took that too. At that point, I figured I was out. The last time I entered anything into a writing contest, it was for poetry and that was back in high school. That poem actually made it into the semifinals of the contest and was published in two different National Library of Poetry anthology’s. But still I figured I was out. But then they announced the first place winner. Flight of the Raven, by Leah Bergquist.  HA!!! You should have heard how they pronounced my name! I started giggling like a crazy person. It wasn’t exactly that I’d won first place that had me completely ecstatic. It’s that they announced it in front of TRACY HICKMAN and PAUL GENSEE! Two New York Times Best Selling Authors! Holy exciting Batman.

Well, now I’m going to post it on my website, which should be up sometimes this weekend. It took forever because I wanted to put my own artwork on the site. So I had to finish my oil painting that I plan on using as my cover art for The Black Vale. It took nearly a year and a half to paint that thing and it turned out almost like I wanted it to. Close enough. Mom was a huge help. We spent quite a few hours sitting together and painting on it. That was quality mother/daughter time right there. But it looks great now and is ready for use. I put in on about 500 bookmarks that I ordered from Vistaprint and am featuring it as a header on my web site. I’ll have a lot of my artwork on that site, by the way. Both mine and moms.

Anyhow, other ventures of mine have been the designing and fabricating of my costume for Comic Con this year. I’m going with my friend Ginny again and her sister is coming. We’re going as Black, White and Red Final Fantasy mages, but we’re putting a steam-punk twist to it. I’m making a lot of my costume out of real sued. I’ve broken so many sewing machine needles. And doing eyelets is obnoxious!

But to answer the question asked up top, “When can I buy the book?” I don’t know. Someday, that’s for sure. I need to buy ISBN numbers before I can even self-publish it. It takes one per format. But I’m hoping to have I up for sale digitally within the next 6 months to a year. It just depends on funds and how long it takes to get it up and running without getting screwed over some bogus contract or another.

I guess we’ll see.

So…enough yammering from me. I’ll write again when something interesting happens.