Consummatum est.

With today's completion of the first draft of my novel, I now officially receive my membership card in the I've Written a Book Club. Member number: too many digits to reproduce here.

I wonder what the ratio of written books to published books is. (And there is no shortage of published books!) How many hopeful authors, how many queries, how many manuscripts gathering the electronic equivalent of dust in the electronic equivalent of the bottom drawer?

Mine is now among them....

I need to seek conventional wisdom: query agents while redrafting, or after? The former seems like a more efficient use of time, while the latter seems more prudent, to the extent that the book may change substantially between drafts, rendering the query irrelevant and the agent pissed off. (On the other hand, I've been fiddling with the plot on this thing for over a decade, and I really don't think there's that much more in the way of major changes I want to do with it.)

Learning all the time, I'm learning all the time.