Top Finds and Tangents

Over the course of querying, I've found the agents for Jean Auel (queried today) and Sharon Kay Penman (WOW - and queried on the 14th). There are a lot of agents I've queried who have particularly amazing reputations, whose responsiveness indicates a level of service which is just as important to me as genre matching has been. The partial request I got last week came from a woman whose buzz is that she is a remarkable and generous agent, and certainly if the attention she gives even rejectees is any indication, the work she must do for her chosen clients must be phenomenal.

There's more to consider in the querying game than just "do they have authors like me?", and this whole process has been a great learning experience. I'm appreciating it for far more than taking my mind off of unemployment, and I have to say - of all the "constructive things" I might have been doing in between working for actual paychecks, this one is tops in the discipline department. Research is one of those things that can bend your brain and wear you out, but it DOES force you to organization, to awareness, to essential connectedness. I am not getting dressed and going out every single workday, and talking to actual human people, but I am reaching out perhaps even more "actual" work would have me doing. I'm grateful for what this is doing for me.

Research itself is a funny thing, and at times I have considered blogging about that, too. In any attempt to educate oneself, it is extraordinary what you can find once you start looking. It's easy to go on a tangent - so even the discipline of HOW to do research insists itself upon you.

Reading for the novel, I might stray from my point of studying brick-making in Late Antiquity, into larger points of architecture, and maybe even off into daydream-swinging, reference by reference, into art, or - DANGER! - other periods of history, or finer technical points and mechanics. Likewise, reading up on an agent, it's seductive to get too into a catalogue of works, to start Amazon-hunting those works themselves, and even then ones like them, to fantasize about filling up my bookshelves with rich, creamery Other People's Books. I've learned the best sites to look at, the best ways to deal with particularly extensive client lists, the very way people are named, to fine tune the directions I follow, the links I take online. It's all a fascinating process.

I hated, when I was young and student-ing by obligation, having to learn things. But as a quasi-grownup, I've found that learning new stuff, ferreting, rummaging - RESEARCHING - is one of my best things. I worked on a project with a manager once, researching our own city for the benefit of "marketing" it to prospective recruitees to our company. Learned the most amazing things about this town. I've researched an ancient barbarian king, and his whole world. I've researched potential employers, different software packages and their respective bags of tricks, the relationships which prove the most daily use at a corporation I'm new to ... I'll study the directions to a new destination I'm driving to, in order to set it up inside my wee little brain.

I used to work with a girl whose "thing" was looking up stuff. She was the unofficial researcher in chief; we called her Digger.

I sometimes laugh, thinking I've taken up the same skill, and to the scope and degree I have no less. Not what I might have expected of myself.