For the saga of the chair see my last two posts here and here or just scroll down.
I still do not have a working chair. I still don’t know when I’ll have a working chair. I still don’t know how much it will cost. Nevertheless there has been progress.
A friend sent me a link to an appropriate company. An engineer from the specialist company came and looked at it and wrote a report about the extent to which it is busted and what needs to be done to fix it.
We now know that a part of the footrest lift needs to be replaced and that some of the upholstery is damaged and needs to be fixed or replaced. What we don’t have yet is a quote. I imagine it will cost less than replacing the entire chair. I certainly hope that’s the case. However I am half expecting that there will be some bullshit reason why they can’t fix it or, it will cost more than we can afford, or they’ll have to take the chair away for a couple of weeks, or there will be some other problem that means I’m stuck with this broken chair.
So what else is up with me? Well, I’m still querying. That has to be the most boring possible sentence to anyone who’s not a writer. To anyone who is a writer it can have myriade meanings. It can seem optimistic, heroic even, or it can induce a feeling of dread, or horror, or even guilt.
If you’re not a writer, or you’re new to writing and you don’t know much about querying yet, what it means when I say that I’m still querying is that I haven’t yet given up on the idea of getting the work that I’m querying traditionally published. And yes, before you ask, that might well be both insanely optimistic and pointless. But it’s not like I’ve got anything else to do today.
This week, in pursuit of displacement activity, I set up a spreadsheet to track my queries. It was a chastening experience to realise that spreadsheet software has moved on so much that my existing skills are basically useless. I probably need to do some sort of course. If you’ve got any recommendations for a free course in either Google sheets or Open Office spreadsheets then feel free to leave them in the comments.
However even my shitty skills are enough to be able to tell at a glance that I’ve submitted 4 queries this week. That doesn’t sound like a lot but each one requires a personalised letter, which requires a bunch of research into the Agent and their other clients, and also the customising of the synopsis. This week for example I had to write an entirely new synopsis because I needed one that was under 300 words. You can’t just cut a hundred words out of a 400 word synopsis and still get something readable. You need to write a different kind of synopsis, one that’s paired down to just the personal journey of the central character.
The other thing I’ve been up to this week is pain. Lots and lots of pain. Down to my last three Tramadol levels of pain. At first the pain was in my legs and was definitely caused by not being able to get my feet up often enough. However now it’s my arms. I don’t know if it’s the exercise I’ve been doing that’s triggered the pain, or if something has changed in my posture because of the leg pain, or if this is just a flare up that would have happened anyway but I do know that this level of pain is ridiculous. Nothing should hurt this much without an obvious cause.
Enough complaining. I’m going to wrap this thing up now. If you want to know more about querying have a look at the latest post on my author blog.
The Stick of Doom speaks 