First dragon of the year

Having declared 2020 the year of facing our writing dragons, I'm ready to describe my recent encounter with a dragon. This dragon actually arrived at the end of last year, and I'm calling her Bertrice.

Now Bertrice doesn't particularly sound scary. In fact, she came wrapped in extraordinary news. At a writing conference, I had the opportunity to pitch my novel to agents, and two asked me to send them materials. Yay! Time to celebrate!

All that's left is to complete the edits I'd been working on, and send it to them. Except...

Sending it to them involves writing a query letter. What do I know about writing a query letter? And does the advice I found online really apply since this is responding to a request rather than a typical query? And one of them asked for a synopsis. Eek! The synopsis is soooo hard! And one of them asked for an author bio. What on earth is that? What's interesting about me?

There you have it. Bertrice was flying around sowing doubt and fear.

However, that wasn't her intention. Once I got past how big and scary her claws were, and how her wings could flatten me, I saw that she really wanted to help. Silbrith helped me find good resources for the query and synopsis, and I found one that clarified the author bio. I made a to-do list -- because I love to-do lists -- and suddenly Bertrice wasn't so scary anymore.

Bertrice and I were able to share a nice cup of hot chocolate to celebrate getting all of the materials to the two agents. And chocolate was also appropriate to kick-off the AO3 Chocolate Box season. I'm looking forward to writing more fanfic over the next four weeks.