Erin Lodes

AHHHHHHHHHH!!!

AN AGENT REQUESTED MORE OF MY BOOK AN AGENT REQUESTED MORE OF MY BOOK AN AGENT REQUESTED MORE OF MY BOOK HOLY SHIT HOLY SHIT HOLY SHIT!!!

Who’s screaming? Is that me? Couldn’t be. I am calm and cool and definitely not jumping up and down right now…

Ha. Right.

So I’ve been querying for about a week (at the time of writing, not publishing) this blog post. And I GOT MY FIRST PARTIAL REQUEST!!! I was just sitting on the couch, watching TV, minding my own business when the email buzzed on my phone. I opened it calmly, expecting another rejection. By this point I’d gotten three. But even as I was expecting a rejection, there was that quiet little flutter of hopeful wings in my chest.

Which erupted into a flock of birds and butterflies and dragons and everything else with wings when I opened the email and read that she had enjoyed my sample pages (I sent her my first five pages in addition to a query and synopsis per her submission guidelines) and SHE WOULD LIKE ME TO SUBMIT MY FIRST FIFTY PAGES!!!

I jumped up off the couch and I started screaming and jumping up and down and yelling the good news at my husband who then picked me up and spun me around as I was screaming, waving my phone in the air like it was a sword and I’d just won a battle. Our puppy, very confused and unsure if he should be playing or attacking someone at this point, then started barking at us for not including him in whatever the hell it was we were doing.

Fifty pages. That’s all it was. Just a request for more pages. And I’d gone into this knowing that this is how it goes. A query and then a partial and then a full. But I couldn’t believe it was happening to me. Like, someone actually wanted to read more based on what they’d seen so far and I was so happy I couldn’t stand still.

I paced the apartment as I waited for my laptop to boot up — it’s a million years old and regularly takes 15 to 20 minutes to actually fully turn on — and I just kept repeating: “She wants my first 50 pages. She wants my first 50 pages. HOLY SHIT SHE WANTS MY FIRST 50 PAGES!”

All through logging into my email — and realizing I had named the document using an old title and not the current title and fixing that — and submitting my pages through their submissions manager, I couldn’t stop bouncing up and down. I found it difficult to type.

And it was amazing and that holy shit this is so great feeling is still buzzing around and I could end the blog post there.

But I won’t.

I’ll mention that in the midst of all the joy and celebrating, I still found time to glance through exactly what 50 pages meant for me (the first three chapters) and think Oh man I wish she’d asked for more because chapter four is so much better. I still found time to doubt myself and my book. Because, of course.

But I’m not hanging out in that feeling. I’m going back to the holy shit elation. I’m going back to wings and flying and jumping up and down (and doing a celebratory tequila shot with my husband) and getting barked at by my puppy. And while I spend the rest of 4-6 weeks, according to the agent’s timeline, checking my email every other minute, I’m going to do everything I can to keep that feeling around.

So HOLY SHIT AN AGENT REQUESTED MY FIRST FIFTY PAGES!!!

AHHHHHHHHHH!!!

How I Published My Novel is going to be an ongoing blog series detailing how I get this freaking thing published. I know, I know, you could probably tell that from the title… I’ve gotten to this point (and am still getting help from) the amazing John Adamus, who is my writing coach.

If you haven’t already, check out Part One of How I Finished My Novel, and start from the beginning of this story.