My goal for 2024 is to find an agent. I have a lot of work to do before I am ready to query, but I can’t seem to get started putting what I hope are the final touches on my manuscript. We are in that limbo of a no man’s land between Thanksgiving and New Year’s, when shopping and eating and drinking and and family and other distractions fill the void.
I know what I have to do:
- Make sure the use of numerals vs. spelled-out numbers conforms to some kind of established and consistent style, following rules such as these;
- Decide what to do with the main character’s thoughts — e.g., when or if to use italics. She talks to herself a lot;
- Correct all the dialogue tags such as she smiled or she laughed. There are a lot of them because I didn’t believe my mentor when she said not to use them. But it’s true;
- Correct all typos;
- Make sure the three asterisks that delineate scenes are actually centered after I compile from Scrivener to Word;
- Make sure I have tied up all the loose ends and then turn it over to a couple more beta readers.
How do I know that’s all I have left to do? Well, I have been working with a mentor, who has now read all but the last six chapters line by line. It’s been through a very helpful sensitivity read because I have a Black main character. A former classmate was the alpha reader, and two clergy friends (one of them a playwright) read it because of the spirituality that permeates the pages. But no, I am not sure that all that’s left is the cosmetic list I enumerated above. At some point, you just have to pull the trigger.
By the way, my goal for 2023 was to write a novel, and I did that. So I shouldn’t beat myself up too much for procrastinating. But 2024 is four days away. Shit, meet Fan.
