It’s not going so well.

First off, how do I condense this thing, this world that I’ve built over the past fifteen years, into one sentence? If I could explain it in a sentence, why would I have bothered to write a book?

Secondly, I’m supposed to sell it. The whole point of this letter is to engage the curiosity of some unknown literary agent out there and persuade them to read the handful of chapters I will be sending along with said letter. I’m supposed to make it catchy, give it a hook. Which is simple enough, I guess, for someone not suffering from imposter syndrome so crippling that they have a hard time admitting to people that they even wrote a book to begin with.

I hate this. Facing down the “writing business” makes me want to just go run and hide in the world I’ve created. I like the writing. I love the writing. But holy cats do I hate the writing business.

This is the thing I am writing to avoid writing a query letter. It’s pretty much just me screaming into an online pillow.

But hey, if you have some advice on how to write the damn query letter, or you are one of the, say, FIVE people I’ve let read my book and you have some brilliant, hooky ideas of how to present it, let loose. I’m all ears.

Once I put down the pillow.