I want to know everything about what is going on with my agent's efforts to find a publisher for my latest manuscript - the big one - the one I took two years to complete. It's only natural to want to know the potential and the realities: how long it will take to get it under contract, how much money I can expect for the advance, who he's talking to, what they think. But I don't get to know these things, and I know why. My agent has been in the business for a long time - more than half a century, in fact. He's got it down. He knows what he's doing, and what he's not going to do. He's not going to set bars of expectation. From a business perspective, it makes perfect sense. From my personal perspective it is sheer agony. The vacuum of information is killing me.
This is how it goes and how it is. I am paralyzed by this lack of information. I can't write with all this doubt - not much anyway. What I do manage to write is pure garbage. It is distracted nonsense, gibberish. Kind of like this post.
Still, it is a lesson-learned for me, and should be as well for the new writers following this blog. Don't expect to know what's going on. I'm sure each agent is different, but I'm guessing that the more experienced ones pretty much follow the same mantra. Don't set bars of expectation because chances are your client will be disappointed with the ultimate results.
So I'm going to have to put up with the vacuum and live with my own expectations and get back to the gibberish. I can always edit it later.
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