So this was an exciting weekend for my book! As everyone knows, I've written a young adult book called The Norns' Quest. I'm not sure what a "young adult" book is-- it seems it can be anything from overly simplistic writing (like the Percy Jackson series) to sophisticated, adult-level writing that is written on fantasy-like subject matter that appeals to teens (like The Golden Compass). My book is more like the latter. I wrote it with the idea that it would be read by 13-16 year olds and didn't dumb down the vocabulary, but on revisions chose to replace some of the more obscure words with simpler choices.
Without giving anything away, here's the "blurb" that I wrote for the book:
Moments before she dies in a freak car accident, 14-year-old Abbie Stevenson's mind and soul are stolen by a trio of mystical girls from the future, known as the Norns. Her soul is taken thousands of years into the future and stitched into another girl's body, the body of the legendary Valkyrie. Stranger still, when she wakes up, she finds herself in a primative, feral world run completely by children. Adults are nonexistent. She's told that the Norns need her to travel to Asgard, the home of the Norse Gods, to become imbued with magical runes which will allow her to return to her time and stop the terrible catastrophe that destroyed the world. But as she navigates the broken future devastated by the death of ancient gods, Abbie realizes that everything isn't exactly as it seems.
As I posted a week or so ago, we were really excited because we finally finished our fifth proofread of the book and finished the final formatting so that we can print personal copies of it off of Lulu.com. A good friend of mine from work, Brandon, did me a huge favor and did the layout and design of the dust jacket for the book. He did such an amazing job, that I can't wait for family and friends to see the finished copy when we order additional copies. It looks so sharp and so professional.
The most exciting part? The proof copy that we ordered will be here on Tuesday. How awesome is that? On Tuesday, I'll hold 608 pages of my very first novel. A huge, hard-backed copy of a real book... THAT I WROTE! We're all super excited about it.
Which brings me to the next exciting thing-- this weekend we sent query letters to five literary agents, requesting that they review sample pages of The Norns' Quest and see if they will represent me in trying to get the book published. There was a whole process I went through in deciding if I even wanted to publish it or not because, as weird as this sounds, I wrote it for the family, and once they read it (and loved it), I wasn't sure that I wanted to publish it. But Mommio, of course, talked me into it. So we researched a bunch of different agents, picked the ones we thought would be good matches for the book, and sent out our first five queries to them.
Will anyone respond? Odds are: no. All of these agents say they receive over 300 queries a month, and they only request to see five or six manuscripts from those 300. And then if they don't like the manuscript, they pass. So while it's a longshot, it's still exciting to start the process and see what happens.
I think I'll start putting up posts about the whole process I went through in thinking up, writing, editing and getting the book ready to publish. But for now, I wanted to just give everyone the current status.
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