You'd Better Shop Around

Mary Emerick is a monthly columnist for Cheek Teeth. She blogs at Inside the Mountain's Skin.
 
Anyone else old enough to remember the Captain and Tennille? I am!

I loved them! Their music was silly but catching. I was ten or eleven, I think, when they were famous, and I even got my hair cut in a “Toni” style. I watched their show on TV. I had their albums.

I haven’t thought of them in years, but suddenly one of their songs, a Smokey Robinson cover, is caught in my head. I am shopping around two manuscripts and “Shop Around” wafts into my brain at odd intervals and won’t go away.

Shopping around can be a daunting process. You have to thicken your skin by inches when the rejections come in. There is no easy way to do this. An agent tells me she can’t connect with my characters. Another wants more narrative arc. Some don’t respond at all.

As part of shopping around, you are done with the fun part, the writing part. You have to put in the work: edit, edit, edit. Format. Look for competitive titles. Figure out what your audience is. And platform—what the heck is that anyway? Figure out why those paragraphs are indented. Sigh in frustration. Go for a run. Come back. Spend hours on one query letter sentence. Surf the Internet for examples. Print on the diabolical printer that seems to know when something is important and likes to throw in a paper jam just when the last page comes out. Trek to the post office and hand your package over, if the query is old school, or push a key. Hope for the best. Count the days, because this agent said if he does not respond in three weeks he’s not interested. Other times, queries fall into the Bermuda Triangle, never to be seen again. And once in a while there is a gem—someone who takes the time to write back and say what they liked and what needs to be done.

Shopping around is my least favorite part of writing. In a perfect world, my writing would be discovered just like a future supermodel is discovered, walking in the mall one day. Whisk! Off to Paris. When I shop around, I feel like everything hangs in the balance, because it does: years of stolen moments spent pressing computer keys in silence, rewriting, rewriting, rewriting. I want it to mean something more than just a document on my computer. I don’t care about bestseller lists, or lots of money. I just want that elusive book.

So I shop around, with a somewhat irritating song in my head.

My mama told me, you’d better shop around...

At least it’s not Muskrat Love. Not old enough to remember that one? Google it. Maybe it will get stuck in your head.

You’re welcome.