In the Thick of It
Friday, October 9, 2009 
The last few days I've had this eerie feeling of 1980s high school déjà vu. And not just because I saw World Party live at the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival this past Saturday night.
It's also that I've been sending a lot of notes lately, and waiting on needles and prickly pins for the cool girls and boys to respond. I swear I blush each time I check email and find that an agent has written back and wants to see my stuff.
My book is done. Finished. I still find myself fighting the urge to tinker with inconsequential word choices and speaker attributions. But as of a week ago, I'm calling it done. And now I'm in the thick of the agent hunt.
I keep getting told that it's nearly impossible in the current climate to publish a short story collection as a debut work of fiction. ("The short story is the new poem," Jim Rutman of Sterling Lord Literistic recently said.) I'll be honest: this is not terribly encouraging.
But there's always the anomaly, right? The exception that decimates the rule. And frankly my current stats aren't that shabby: I've got seven full manuscripts and three partials out there with agents right now--that's nearly a 50% success rate on my queries so far--and I'm still waiting for responses to a number of other outstanding queries.
Once this whole thing is behind me (one way or the other), I'll detail my whole querying enterprise. But for now, I'll just put in a plug for Patrick McDonald's Query Tracker service, which has revolutionized the process of researching and querying agents, and tracking your progress along the way. I've got no paper trail at all--everything related to my agent hunt lives in Query Tracker's database, which lets me run all sorts of nifty reports across a huge range of data and variables. Very cool and arguably the best $25 investment I've ever made.