“Prepare the Standard Rich and Famous Contract.”
Of all the landmarks in a writer’s life, nothing ever matches the first time someone tells you your work makes them want to vomit. For me it happened twenty minutes after I sent Dust, my first novel, as an e-query to the first of the long list of names I’d collected from the Agent Query website; I pressed the “send” button, my hand shaking with nerves, expecting to wait weeks or months to hear a word. Instead, a immediate terse reply: My sample chapters were “nauseating,” but they knew a tiny independent horror press who might like them. (The tiny horror press was indefinitely closed to submissions. Occasionally, I think the agent knew this in advance.)
