Status quo vadis

(I'm not sure that means anything.)

A fan who is a singer-songwriter emailed me to tell me she has a new CD coming out -- I'll link to it once she has it up on her site -- and asked me if I had any new books. I told her about my novel, which I have been trying to get an agent for for a year now. She gave me the name of a contact in publishing, so now I'm sending my manuscript to a guy whose wife works for one of the big publishers. I don't really have anything else going on, so why not. In response to my email, he asked for the whole manuscript, so I got the chance to print the whole thing out for the first time in quite a while. To do so, I took the 24 separate files (one for each chapter) and combined them into one big 1.2 MB file, so that it would paginate correctly. And I was pleasantly suprised that it came in under 500 pages. I was thinking it was 600 or more.

I'll send it off tomorrow. It's a shot in the dark, but it gives me a hopeful feeling. And a friend, Jessica Prentice, came up to me after church and told me someone had accepted her book proposal. That was another encouraging piece of news; that's two friends in a month who have gotten book contracts. Someday I'll get one too.