Holidays are Hell on Productivity

The last two weeks has been somewhat of a whirlwind, as I'm sure it has been for pretty much everyone out there. I've been pretty much just a notch over useless for that period of time and to be honest, it was wonderful.

Caitlin was very kind to give me a soft date of January 10th for my next edit, and let me know that there was no pressure as we were not working with publishers yet. I'm going to keep the pressure on myself, however, as I need to learn to meet deadlines. I've got a lot of work done, I've got a lot of work to do, and I have seven days to do it in. I will be, ahem, unavailable until next Monday.

I got some great stuff for Christmas. Some wonderful essentials from everyone: my oldest brother's family gave me a new hand mixer and chocolate covered pretzels (yes, choco-pretzels are an essential). A new fondue pot from another brother, and a free-standing recipe holder from my sister, a hand made pizza peal from another brother, cookies and hand-made ornaments from another and numerous other awesome stuff that I'm surely offending people by not listing. I only now realized that easily three quarters of my gifts had to do with food or baking. That's what I get for giving everyone chocolate chip cookies for their birthdays.

I received another wonderful gift quite unexpectedly from Isaac Stewart (the guy who does a lot of art and maps for Brandon Sanderson's books and doesn't have a website so why don't you get on that Isaac?) in the form of Brandon's latest book, The Way of Kings. I'm looking forward to hitting that book hard while Caitlin has my next edit in a week or so.

I continually find myself about 60-100 posts (or 1-2 weeks) behind in my google reader and playing catch up to read industry blogs. An interesting trend I'm seeing for the year end is that agents who blog also like to put up their numbers for the year.

Being a numbers guy myself--I use spreadsheets for everything, from finances to WoW to writing--I enjoy this. The first thing I noticed was that agents are wildly different. I've been told this, but the numbers backed it up. Two single agents each pulled down around 3K and 5K queries for the year, and offered reps on just 10 and 2 manuscripts respectively. Another agency of two agents had total numbers of 36000 queries for the year (holy crap) and offered on... wait for it... 9 manuscripts. The numbers are kind of staggering to someone looking to get an agent and they make me feel really grateful that my book got the kind of response it did. An agent-less author should take some heart from the numbers though and realize that every agent wants different things, and is accepting different amounts, and don't get depressed about your first forty rejections.