Caffeine, queries, and connubial prep*

I’ve have a new hypothesis, and as far as I know, it has absolutely no basis in scientific thought, but anecdotal evidence seems to support it. Ready?

Caffeine makes me fall asleep.

Seriously. With all I’ve been doing lately, I’ve been looking for a bit of an extra kick in the evenings. Last evening, I stopped by at Starbucks, and then later had a soda, and I was in bed by 12:30 anyway, barely able to keep my eyes open. Today, I had no caffeine, and I’m still going strong. Weird, huh?

I’d say it was impossible, but I’ve read the back of Nyquil packets where it says stuff like “may cause drowsiness or sleeplessness” so I’m thinking that perhaps we don’t know what certain drugs will do to our systems. Maybe my body chemistry is just the type that caffeine makes sleepy.

NyQuil, on the other hand, just makes me hallucinate. Seriously. I never touch the stuff, after one particularly bad experience during flu season in college where I saw spiders crawling down the walls. I’ve since met two other people who also have the “spider” side effect with NyQuil, so I know I’m not nuts. Not completely, anyway.

The other person living in this apartment also has a strong reaction to caffeine. If he gets near it, he’s awake for days. Our genes might mix in an interesting manner, methinks.

So there was a suggestion put forth in yesterday’s post that I read people’s queries here on the blog. As Carrie can attest, I’m a nosy little snot when it comes to query-tweaking, so on one hand, it seems like a good idea. On the other, I don’t know if it would be a very popular proposition for folks, for the following reasons:

1) For it to work on any kind of ‘workshop’ level, folks would have to post their queries on the internet. And though I know a lot of people are perfectly comfortable doing that (like Erica, who did very well with her Miss Snark Crapometer entry), it’s not a practice I recommend, so I feel weird about encouraging it here.**

2) I’m not an agent or editor. If you send your query to Jessica Faust or Nephele Tempest or similar, you have the possibility of gaining the attention of these fabulous agents. And though an agent or editor is always welcome to contact you (or me) if they see something they like here, it’s not as clear cut as it would be at an actual agent’s blog. I have no idea if any agents read my blog. (Actually, I know at least one does, because she told my editor at lunch that she did. Hi, Agent!) But seriously, if you could get your query critiqued by Jessica Faust or me, go for Jessica. That’s a no-brainer.

3) It’s way, way harder to fix a query when you haven’t read the story. I’m not going to be reading stories. I noticed this a lot during the Miss Snark Crapometers and similar experiments. Miss Snark et al. are usually very good at pointing out the queries that are focusing on the wrong details, but with the generic ones, they can’t do much except make up wild conjectures about the actual plot of the book. Which may point out to the writer what they are doing wrong, I guess, but having seen more than one writer’s reaction to such a response, my guess is that it mostly pisses them off. Which leads me to…

4) Man, I don’t want to piss anyone off.

So I’m still mulling this over. Maybe it should be a contest kind of thing: enter if you want your query critiqued, and I’ll pick a couple of people. Maybe then at least I’d know if there are more than one or two people actually interested?

If a query crit is something that might interest you, please leave a comment here (anonymous is fine). It definitely wouldn’t be for another few weeks though, what with the wedding and all.

Speaking of, look what my friends did to me at the bachelorette party:

Their cheesiness knows no bounds. Lovely gals. I’m so lucky to have them!

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* It occurs to me that, in the light of the jargon from my books, this title sounds a lot sketchier than it is.
** I do not mean to inspire paranoia. Certainly I don’t ascribe to the idea that industry folks are out to “steal your stories.” But the internet is the internet, and there are certain things that don’t need to be Googleable until they are under contract, IMO. We have no idea who is reading this blog. Seriously, someone got here the other day by Googling “What is Snuffleuppagus’s first name?” Just keep that in mind.