I am wondering if I am now officially an author. Beyond writing something …a novel, picture book, or graphic novel… is it really when we start the journey of peddling what we have spent time, energy, and our soul on that we truly become authors? Is it the act of diving into the bits and pieces of our own words to write an explanation with a hook, tagline, one sentence summary, short/long synopsis, comps, or stating the target audience that solidifies us into this seemingly elite group of authorship? The agonizing over and finally setting free a query that we hope will be well met by the right person at the right time, is this what makes us worthy of being called an author? I don’t have an answer to these questions, but I wish I did.

I successfully (subjective) sent out four queries and already received one rejection. I would have loved to be represented by the agent in question. She is the agent of an author that I adore and seemed to be in my realm of genre (in some sense), but it is not meant to be. I really took a chance with her, because the instructions on her agency’s website state that I am not allowed to query any other agent (within the agency), if I am rejected by one of them. There was one other who was a possibility, but not any more.

Thankfully, I have many more agents to query. My next steps will be writing a short synopsis. Two agents on the top of my list have a synopsis listed, with many other requests, on their query manager page. I started writing a synopsis already, but it was too detailed. I came to this realization about two pages into my summary, even though I had not made it half-way through the book. The short synopsis is supposed to be two pages, double-spaced.

My plan is to outline the major aspects of the story, and then… NO, I don’t already have an outline. Remember, I am a pantser. I wrote the story as it came to me. I did NOT pre-outline the story before writing. As I was saying, I will outline the story, then write a sentence or two summarizing each major part. Hopefully, this will give me a good start to the synopsis.