Once in a while, if a blog reader is rejected by him and emails back to give him permission to, he'll critique their query letter on his blog (with author-anonymity in place.)
Guess who got rejected by Nathan recently. *waves*
He says he'll try to have my query critique up today (EDIT: It's up now!). The query that got rejected is centred around the pitch y'all helped me hone in my Bop-A-Goblin! post, so I thought I'd point you all toward Nathan's blog so we can see how our instincts about writing a good hook compare to a real!live!omigosh! literary agent's impression of it.
The good news is he said he basically liked the query letter. Yay, us! We rule! We'll hopefully get to hear details about how well he thought the pitch worked when he gets the post up.
The also-good-in-a-totally-different-way news doesn't pertain to the rest of you, but I'll document it anyway. He said it was the pages he rejected.
Yowie-ow-ouch. How is it good news that he rejected my writing, you ask? Well, because he said why he didn't like it. And he said he might post a short excerpt of the writing (I gave him permission to) with the query letter and give more detailed comments there.
Feedback from a real!live!omigosh! literary agent? Hurrah! *does a goblin-dance* This is fabulous, even though it's going to be acutely painful also. (and, omigosh, public...)
I'm already thinking how to rewrite that first scene with respect to Nathan's initial comment, and I'll do so after I've absorbed his blog readers' comments also
Of course, I'm not really happy about my writing being rejected, but this is a great opportunity. It also restores my faith in the system; a rejection should be based on the book, not the hook (the writing of which is a mysterious art to most of us; it takes some learning.) And while I still have faith I've written a good book, I can totally see where Nathan is coming from in his criticism of my opening scene. It does need to be slowed down, so the reader gets dropped into the world of the novel more gently.
*sigh* I'd better go test those chocolates to make sure they're deep enough for diving.
Oh, and one more thing:
Yay, Nathan Bransford! *waves pom-poms for Mr. SuperNice*
