Took a little time this evening and bundled all my market stuff for the old novels into a single page, for easy access. Okay, I just wrote "I got discouraged in 2008 and didn't push things as hard as I could have," but that's a damned lie, when I stop and think about it. Every novel is out somewhere, and I do not have the power to make agents or publishers respond to me faster.

For 2009, I may withdraw Conscience of the Demon, which has been at DAW since 2003 -- the folks at DAW are nice, but they've stopped responding to my yearly queries. The people at Baen, who've had Gilding the Apocalypse since 2004, reliably tell me it's on somebody's desk, and while I'm not in love with a five year turnaround, the communication is enough for me.

No idea what to do with Courtship and Cutlery. Anna Genoese got the full manuscript for Tor Paranormal Romance (per her request after reading the first 50) in 2005, and then she left Tor, and now Tor Paranormal Romance has a policy of not answering queries (which is fine; if the policy is there, at least I know it). I may have to pull this as a lost cause as well, since there's no guarantee that it actually made the transition to another editor at Tor.

The Palace Job has been at a small Canadian publisher for more than a year with no query response. No idea what to do there. I might withdraw it and fling the first 50 pages at Tor's normal fiction line. If I'm leaving the novel in limbo, I might as well leave it in limbo with a larger publisher.

It's tempting just to let this stuff sit, to avoid doing anything given the crappiness of the publishing world at the moment, but if I do that, then I'll just have a bunch of trunk novels. Some of these might be trunk novels anyway (I don't think that they are, but time may disagree with me), but I need to keep sending this stuff out.

Another option is to focus more diligently on agents, but agents have been only a little more responseful than publishers in 2008. I got several polite rejections, which is great, and a bunch of non-responses, which is less great. I'm also trying to figure out what to do in terms of these agents, because ideally, I get an agent and that's that -- which makes me feel odd about querying three agents simultaneously for three different books. If the books were different enough that an agent wouldn't handle some of it (a romance and a hard SF novel, for example), that'd be one thing, but it's all fantasy. Again, no idea what to do here.

But I need to keep doing something.

So last week, I queried several places. One week later, I have heard back from exactly none of them.

I think I've gone through some phases as a writer:

• New writer: They'll get back to me next week, right? I mean, they couldn't have anything more important to do than read the novel of a nineteen year old who desperately needs to get laid! That kind of fiction just leaps off the shelves!
• Veteran writer: Yep, I query every couple of years. It's hard, but those are the breaks. I'm trying to sell them my stuff, so I do it on their terms.
• Professional writer: What the hell? Sure, tell me it's gonna take awhile, but tell me. If you don't have the professional ability to answer a simple query after a frelling year, then don't accept slush in the first place. It doesn't hurt my feelings to have you not accept slush. I'll just send it somewhere else. But this "Oh, we try, and it takes several years, and we can't respond to queries sent by e-mail or snail mail" garbage? If your organization is that bad, why the hell do I think you're my best shot to getting onto the shelves, again?

Seriously. Either accept slush correctly, or don't accept it. I'll be fine either way. But don't make the big magnanimous gesture and then expect me to put up with simple incompetence.

(And yes, each of the four could have extremely reasonable explanations, with an editor out of the office sick, on vacation, swamped with a deadline, or trying to hunt down my manuscript. All four, however, is one of those state-of-the-market moments.)

Not sure what I'm going to do, but the wheels are in motion.

So, it's February, when I usually do the yearly queries. Currently, I'm at:

Conscience of the Demon: Some (honest can't remember if it was full or partial?) at Daw since October 2003
Gilding the Apocalypse: Full ms. at Baen (past slush, with senior editors) since November 2004
Courtship and Cutlery: Full ms. (requested after partial) at Tor Paranormal Romance since September 2005
The Palace Job: Out recently enough to not worry about querying (less than a year)

Coming up on five years. Dude.

I kind of see why some of my writer buddies who've moved into video games don't write as much of their own stuff any longer. Mass Effect took years to come out, yeah, but at least I was working on it every day (that I was on the project), and it's been bought and played by (checks public figures) well over a million people already, which is more than the average novel.

Nevertheless, I like my Victorian murder mystery and my Peruvian deity getting a cow dropped on him and my gay jellyfish-wielding wizard and my three-phrase-vocabulary magical talking warhammer. And so I will query. The folks at Baen have always been great about getting back to me. The Daw folks have been solid with sufficient poking. The Tor folks, as always, have never responded. Ever. Maybe all of Tor has really good spam filters, or maybe I'm just an arrogant entitlement-freak for wanting an answer to my once-yearly queries.

Tomorrow we query. Huzzah!