Whoo!  I managed to get in all five posts this week. Yay me. Please place the cookie on the plate right there, thank you.

I’m waffling between going to an IDPA pistol shooting competition tomorrow, and participating a cool workshop at Saint Louis Writer’s Guild. They are bringing in a young agent to lecture on query letters. This would normally trump any conflicting plans. Insight into querying is precious stuff. Even though I’m agented, I will have to seek agency for my current WiP with a non-YA agent.

However, the older I get the more cynical I get. My bullshit detector is always on.

And query strategies are bullshit magnets. There is no right way to query. It’s a hoax.

Querying is really:

A. All about the hook of your sample pages, or

B. Agents who request no sample pages looking to steal established authors and/or high concept plots.

My heart tells me that I should go see the agent’s workshop. My head tells me that after an hour of hearing the same recycled platitudes that Miss Snark covered ad nauseum, I’ll be sitting there wishing I had gone to the pistol competition. If I thought we’d workshop our actual query letters, I’d commit.

The pistol completion attendance requires waking at 5 a.m.  So there’s that. I may oversleep my way right back into the workshop.

My Beautiful Wife is working a lot. This is neither news nor novel. She’s got a motor. She’s always had a motor. It’s one of the things I love about her. Before I married MBW I had a long term girlfriend who was sweet as could be, but she didn’t have a motor. The girlfriend would sign up for pottery courses at the community college and then drop out half way through the semester. Again and again and again. She’d work her way up from checker to assistant manager at Walmart, then quit, wait, and go back to work as a checker at a different Walmart. Again and again and again. It was exasperating.

Not MBW. She’s an ass-buster. She’s as driven as her mother. This is great. Mostly.

Lately I find myself missing my wife a lot. She’s working late. Working Saturdays. When she’s home on the couch she’s doing homework for the next day. MBW is constantly swimming through work stress, so even when my arms are around her she’s making mental lists of things she has to get done.

One of these days we are going to retire very well. With any luck we’ll still recognize each other. In the last four months I’ve witnessed four long-term relationships of my friends (my age) go up in smoke. Kind of like the wave of babies that arrived in my late twenties and the wave of first divorces that swamped my sphere of awareness in our mid-thirties. When I look into the eyes of Work Zombie Wife, I’m concerned.  I assume this must be how I get when I’m in the last stages of finishing a novel. When she’s distracted I wonder, “Is this the first stage of where it all goes wrong? Should I be trying harder to… To… To what? Tell my wife not to work so hard?”

Might as well tell the wind to stop blowing.

Missing my semi-present wife is on my mind today because the pistol completion will be considerably less fun without her.

The house is in pretty good shape and the lawn got its haircut last night. Nothing to distract. All I have to do is get a curtain rod installed so a visiting guest next weekend won’t have to flash the entire neighborhood when she changes clothes. (The old window treatmens got pitched when we had the new windows installed.) Other than that, the weekend is whatever I want to make of it. As long as I make it by myself.

Hope the rest of you enjoy your beloved fambly this weekend.

All you writer friends, write something.