How to suck really, really badly, and live to tell the tale:
My novel, Busted, was written in the spring of 2006. My wife had given birth to our first child a few months before, and as a new stay-at-home dad, I was looking for a creative outlet to take the place of music composition (which required too much collaboration for my new lifestyle). Writing each evening from ten to midnight, I planned the novel pretty thoroughly for one month and wrote it in under two. Then I showed it to some friends I knew were prepared to be critical (thanks Audrey, Robyn, Simon, and Nick) and waited for the onslaught. To my surprise and delight, their criticism (which was, frankly, voluminous) was tempered with genuine enthusiasm, and I began to believe that Busted might one day find a home on the shelves of your friendly neighborhood bookstore.
All the same, I knew better than to get too excited. See, I’d experienced this particular misapprehension / delusion the previous year, when I’d written a book (let’s call it Dogpile) that was utterly unpublishable for reasons too numerous to list here. The highly reputable agents I queried about the Dogpile needed only three chapters to assure me that they weren’t right for the project, which was really generous of them considering the book was terrible and there isn’t an agent in the world who is right for it. But it wasn’t a complete waste of time. I pretty quickly realized what was wrong with the Dogpile, and vowed not to make the same mistakes again. I also committed to reading more YA novels, to understand the genre better, and now read one or two a week. And most of all, I discovered that even though my book stunk, I wrote a query letter enticing enough to coerce poor, unwitting agents into reading my work.
And as you’ll see in Part 2, that turned out to be a pretty useful skill.
