Current TV show list

- Elementary
- Lucifer
- The Flash
- Supergirl [was not impressed by the first 2 episodes, but hopefully they'll win me back over with Miss Martian]
- Blindspot
- Eyewitness
- Conviction

I have a problem with the fundamental premise of Eyewitness—if the two boys are keeping their witness of the murder a secret because they don't want to explain that they're in a relationship...why can't they just say they witnessed the murder but leave out the relationship part? ??? It's not THAT weird for two guy friends to be like "Yeah, we were just hanging out in the woods, as bros do, and we were tired so we went to this cabin and crashed, as bros do, and then the murder happened." (Or is the point supposed to be that they're being overly paranoid?) Other than that, though, the show feels pretty well done so far, so I can't stop watching. The aesthetic reminds me of American Crime, though slightly less depressingly grimdark (but still pretty dark).

Conviction is, well, very white feminist, and I'm not a huge fan of Hayley Atwell. Also, I'm pretty sure 5 days is nowhere near enough time to investigate an old case and produce exonerating evidence (it can take more than 5 days just to schedule a meeting with people). I dunno, guess they felt like they had to add tension with a tight deadline or something. And the show doesn't seem to shy away from controversial topics, though I'm not sure it handles them well (more to say about that after tonight's episode about a mother murdering her autistic child, I suppose). Still, I can't help watching this show for some base entertainment value. Sigh.

Query update #1

So I already received 1 rejection. That's 1 down, 4 more to go.

I don't know what to think about the fact that I received a rejection literally in a day. My theories are: (1) either the project was really not what the agency represented (even though I did a lot of research on this agent and it seemed to fit within their preferred genres?), or (2) my query letter and/or first 25 pages were so horrible that it was an instant rejection.

Hopefully it's not the latter, because there's nothing I can really do to fix that.

It won't be time for panic mode until I hear back from the 4 others. If it's 4 flat rejections, I might just bow out and submit my manuscript directly to a smaller publisher. I do know there are some aspects of my book that make it a hard sell (New Adult, which is a tiny genre; it's about queer characters, which may or may not make it "niche"), but after 2-3 weeks of reading as much as I can about querying and so forth, I just don't see how I can improve my query letter (unless I join a forum or something). As for the book itself...I'm not entirely sure how to fix that either. It starts basically with the inciting incident, so there's no "chaff" to cut, and the style of this book is that there's a lot of ambiguity/mystery in the beginning that gets slowly explained as time goes on, and I don't want to change that.

I know I'm rambling here. It may be that I do have obvious ways to improve my query letter or first 2 chapters, but I'm just so tired at this point that I can't see it (and law school is on my case, as always). Anyway, worst case scenario (as I predicted much earlier) is either publication at that small publisher, or self-publication (a.k.a. no sales because I don't know how to/don't have the spoons for self-promotion). Will keep the updates coming.

EDIT: Now 2 rejections down, 3 more to go.