Query Quest: A New Rejection Frontier

For the last eight years, I’ve been regaling you (inflicting on you?) tales of rejection woe. Up until now, all of these rejection have had a single source–short story submissions to various genre and literary magazines and anthologies. Friends, that changes today. Not more than a few hours ago, I sent the first query to agents for my novel SECOND DAWN and opened up a whole new world of potential rejections. I’m using QueryTracker to find and record my queries, so I’ll have plenty of data to share with you. That is, of course, unless I manage to land an agent quickly (hah!). Anyway, I promise to share with you my arduous journey toward representation and hopefully publication, but for now, let me just give you the basics on WHAT I’m querying.

Back in 2017, I started a novel titled LATE RISERS that takes the vampire genre, flips it on its head, and then mashes it together with mystery/thriller. Many revisions later, it’s now called SECOND DAWN, and it’s ready to be judged by literary agents. Here are the basic stats.

• Title: Second Dawn
• Genre: Supernatural thriller (vampire)
• Word Count: 89,000
• Logline: Daybreakers meets Donnie Brasco 

So, that’s the basics, and as I send out queries, I expect the rejections to come rolling in, and I’ll share them with you (with certain details removed to protect the innocent). Hopefully, I’ll be sharing with you some more positive things, too, like partial and full manuscript requests and the like. I’m still going to keep sending short stories out, but I expect my submission rate there will slow (it already has) while I focus on this newer, bigger endeavor.

Anyway, wish me luck and stay tuned! 🙂