The most beautiful rejection letter I've gotten thus far. This woman has class.

@KeraShade

I'm surprised an editor has not pointed this out to you before and I could see if it's like this often, a reader could become confused. Each character should always have their own 'paragraph' so Cathie would be correct. The proper format is:

“Another round, little songbird!” a man called from across the tavern.

I bristled. The heels of my boots clicked against the floorboards as I strode over to the bar to collect the order from my youngest brother staffing the taps.

QM: 12/19/2023
Adult romance fantasy faerie tale retelling (~106k)
Responding to a Twitter post requesting more "adult fantasy/romantasy," specifically "low fantasy without a ton of world building and names I can’t pronounce." She invited me to query her via DM, so fingers crossed.

04/25/2024:
I participated in RevPit and although I didn't win, I learned a lot which led to some significant revisions. I asked Cathie on Twitter if I could re-submit with the new opening pages. She provided me a link and requested I withdraw and re-submit. The manuscript will probably be somewhere between 110-111k words, but honestly, it's so much better.

05/13/2024: Personalized rejection that left me so confused. "The most noticeable concern I found was with the dialogue and characters 'stepping' on each other's paragraphs of dialogue, so you might start with that section and there may be other things you'll find as you look at the document and compare it to your work."

"With this said, there may be many agents who are unbothered by those things which are a hard line for me, so I will not be offended if you choose to ignore my suggestion. However, if this document helps you make edits to your manuscript, please feel free to reach out again with a new query at a later date. In the meantime, I wish you the very best!"

I've never encountered this as an issue with an agent, beta readers, or even when I hired a professional editor for developmental/line edits. I THINK her issue started with my second paragraph:

“Another round, little songbird!” a man called from across the tavern. I bristled. The heels of my boots clicked against the floorboards as I strode over to the bar to collect the order from my youngest brother staffing the taps.

According to the document she provided, she wants me to split it into a new paragraph with "I bristled."

I honestly don't think I do the "stepping" thing a lot, but having it present at all is a deal-breaker for Cathie. Just a heads-up for other querying authors.

In case you missed the Twitter announcement- she said for all authors with a query still out with her she will reply to everyone by May 17/ May 20th at the latest.

She posted yesterday that she is going to Marsal Lyon.