How Does An Introverted Author Find A Literary Agent?

One of the things that has usually held me back from sending out manuscripts is that my writing doesn’t always fit a neat niche.  My writing crosses over a number of genres, often examining the psychology of emotions.  I’m usually examining my own inner-self while, at the same time, attempting to get into the heads of others to figure out how their brain is wired.  I’m not always successful, but it makes me far more open to listening when I do this.

Sending out a manuscript is a lot of work for an occupation that is ALREADY a lot of work.  Every so often, I will buy the guide to literary agents (a huge tome in its own right) and will be overwhelmed by the sheer volume of people “looking” for manuscripts. 

Then you have to look at who wants what type.  Again, my writing does not easily fit into niches.  Is what I write a romance?  Is it “literary fiction” (what IS “literary fiction” anyway?), is it Action/Adventure?  Sci-Fi?  Horror?

Another mountain I need to cross is that I don’t WANT to be pigeon-holed.  I happen to enjoy writing what I want to write.  Granted, my Mike Magee series has really taken over my life at this point so that I find writing a short story to be very difficult anymore, but I don’t want to have to churn out book after book of the same stuff.  There are days when I don’t LIKE my Mike Magee character, but he’s with me, a part of me and a part of what I wish I could be. 

Oh, I have a story arc for him because the real story is about his emotional growth in relationships.  I mean, what happens to someone when you finally realize who the perfect person is for you to spend your life with, only to have that person violently yanked away from you?  How does that affect your emotional stability?  What happens when you take someone who is basically a compassionate person and you force them to shove that compassion down?  What happens when you discover that the reason your lover was taken from you was due to some senseless act of violence?  What would you do? 

Couple that with a dark period of having to perform a distasteful job for your government for six years, a hatred of gangs and gang violence because of what they took from you and finding that the government and the gangs are intertwined in a sick and twisted manner, a series of mismatched relationships where you try to recover the youth you’ve lost, a precocious tweener and a Very Large Tomcat named Maggot and you have Mike Magee.

I started out this series as a joke.  One of the ways I’d help stimulate writing among the Lowell, Indiana writers group (which eventually became the core of the Highland Writers Group) was that I would often write opening paragraphs and save them.  The Mike Magee novel (working title:  “Slummin’.”) started out as a paragraph influenced by the likes of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett.  I was going to make him hard-core and tough.  But I don’t like two-dimensional characters.  People get hurt, they have feelings, they bury feelings and those feelings well up at some point.

I’ve been writing since I was 14*, but I didn’t really seriously begin putting effort into it until after my father died.  I buried my grief because I had to hold things together for my mom.  Then they became bottled up and began to poison me, so I looked for an outlet and found one in a writers group.  I’d belonged to others, notably one in San Diego run by the Community College system, but now I was doing some serious writing.  I was letting my emotions flow out from my soul to my fingertips.  I found fellow writers that weren’t aged memoire diarists, but serious writers such as myself.

This group, the Highland Writers Group, helped me immensely to grow as a writer and its format helped me to establish two or three other groups in various cities that still flourish.  My only regret was that I have never successfully learned how to market myself. 

I am, by nature, actually very shy and reclusive.  Many of my friends would laugh at that because I work hard at being outgoing, and I am that way only when I am comfortable with you.  But I have a severe dislike of “tooting my own horn.”  I don’t like to sell myself.  I can sell a product.  I can sell a stock, bond, mutual fund or insurance annuity, but I don’t like selling myself.  I am not egotistical in that way.  But I’ve only met one other writer like that – Spider Robinson. 

I’m much older now than I’d like to admit.  I still refuse to give up on the dream of being a published author and getting my Mike Magee books finished and sold, but I’m getting to the point where that dream is further and further “out there”, as if I’m continually giving the kite more string.

So, what do I do to drag that particular kite back down to me?

*Alas, much of my early writing was lost in 2 events:  my car and laptop being stolen in 2002 when I was transcribing much of my early stuff from paper to disk and a nasty flood in 2008 that wiped out a second computer and destroyed the remaining paper manuscripts.