Seriously?! I'm an Idiot.

Since you might not be able to read the tiny writing at the bottom of the pic. Homer asks "How Come... things that happen to stupid people keep happening to me?" That about sums it up for me too, Homer.

I may or may not be the only writer around these here parts who'd heard of Query Tracker before but never actually took the time to go check it out. (Sometimes, my independent streak really bites me in the ass)

Last night, while browsing through the list of old saved "Agent/Writing Websites" -- that's the highly original name I gave the bookmark, btw -- I found Query Tracker. This time, unlike the last, I actually took a few minutes to stop and look around. Now I'm kicking myself in the pants for having made one portion of this journey much harder than it needs to be.

True, Query Tracker may not be all encompassing, but over 1200 agents listed gives a pretty damn good starting place. And it is sooooo much easier to click a genre and have agent names & websites -- with statistics -- pop up, than it is to sort through the 2000 or so pages in my current literary guide.  And it's FREE!

Oh well, better late than never. But I have to ask, what are your MUST SEE sites? I'm wondering what other places I may have heard of & inadvertently dismissed in those early days when I was positive I knew more about this whole writing deal than I actually did.

REMINDER: DGLM agent, Jim McCarthy, is holding a live online chat from 3-4 EST this afternoon. Click here for the details.

Happy Thursday, All!

Brain Farts

The ever-so-wise Homer Simpson once said :  "How is education supposed to make me feel smarter? Every time I learn something new, it pushes some old stuff out of my brain."


Like Homer, I have my fair share of "DOH!" moments.


My most recent one came last night while I was working, once again, on my first chapter. (That beyotch refuses to go down, I tell you).


Anyway, somewhere in the course of about an hour, I managed to forget everything I know about my tenses. Seriously, I couldn't figure out what tense I was revising in. I write in past tense, but it sounded suspiciously like present to me (and I have no idea why). Yet when I noticed it and tried to correct myself my past tense sounded TOO past tense. 


Have you ever ridden the "Zipper" at the carnival?  That crazy ride where you willingly strap yourself into a cage that zips and twirls and spins high in the air, leaving you not knowing which side is up?  Yeah, that's pretty much what I felt like last night.


It was so bad, I had to stop what I was doing and read a real book just to re-familiarize myself with how to write properly. Darn stupidity leak caused me a whole night of revision work!!


On a positive note, I finally got myself hooked up with the RSS feeds I was talking about a few posts back. So going forward, I should be much better about keeping up with everyone's blogs. 


And I got to meet Terry from A Writer of Wrongs while he and his family were in town this weekend. It was freaking awesome to meet a fellow blog buddy (even if we spent more time talking baseball than writing) and now I'm on a mission to meet as many writing blog buddies as I can.