I need to sharpen my axe.

So, I wrote a book called Manifested. It's great (yah, yah, in my humble opinion).

While I'm not the sharpest tool in the shed, I'm certainly not the dullest; and better yet, I know how to sharpen my axe. Meaning: whatever I don't know, I research and learn.

I honestly thought I had adequately researched the writing, revising, query-ing, and publishing process. However, the scary thing is, the more I research, the more I realize how much I don't know.

This whole process is like putting a puzzle together, but the pieces are constantly in motion. Each time I get a new piece to the puzzle and figure out where it belongs in the big picture, the other pieces have moved again. Oh my.

Most recent realization: my word count is too high. When I originally researched word counts (back in February 2009) I did so based on general adult length books. I did not realize when I started down this path that I was writing a Young Adult book. Thanks to great websites like Kidlit and Guide to Literary Agents, I've come to realize that there are different word counts. Duh. Furthermore, thanks to Kidlit, I've come to realize that many of my rejections may have been based on my word count alone. Sheesh.

I'm off to sharpen my axe ...




Here's the Kidlit post on word count: http://kidlit.com/2009/11/13/manuscript-length/
Here's the guide to Literary Agents post: http://www.guidetoliteraryagents.com/blog/CategoryView,category,WordCount.aspx