Folks, I Did It!

Whew!  Talk about some month...but I did it!  A successful thesis defense and happy graduation day! Besides all the other crazy stuff in my family...my son's (David) jazz festivals, my daughter's (Celeste) singing performances and super crazy ballet recital, my son's (Jaime) gazillion sports games, and the CD Release concert for RTR (Ready2Rejoice - Celeste's and David's Christian rock band)!

So now what?  I am returning to YA big time.  First order of business...do one more round of edits on Awake and send out first batch of query letters to specific agents.  Second, get back to blogging.  I have read several books in the last two months (very exceptional books) and need to say great things about them.  Third, revisit all the other novels I started but put on hiatus because of school...I even already have the first page of a new novel and have been building my story with research and plotting notes.  Fourth, send more of my stuff off to get published in lit journals.  Fifth, (fingers still crossed until like next Wednesday, though I already got the offer...I just have to go do paperwork) do some English/Language Arts planning.  Sixth, lots of family stuff all summer long, picture organizing, house organizing, vacation time, a bit of summer school teaching (I hope), shopping, beach, lots of movies, losing 15 pounds (the grad school fifteen), getting my daughter ready for middle school, and lots more singing, RTR, sports, and general Vasquez craziness...

Well, the hardest part of writing a good query is the novel summary...in a way that will make someone say Yes, I Want More of This!  I am going to try and get this done within next few days and when I do I will post my query letter here.  The other thing is that some agents want a submission of the first pages, but my novel is in poetry so my pages do not have as much text as a regular novel.  Should I just send the amount of pages requested or should I go with word count to match the standard 250 word count per page? Think I'm leaning toward just the number of pages they want and hoping its enough of the story for
them to want a full submission.  So, my query better be awesome to make up for a significantly shorter word submission.  Let's see how it goes!