It's a Writer Thing: Further musings on the phenomenon of the premature query (with graphics!)

In my last It’s a Writer Thing post, I wrote about the day I finished my first book and the thought process I had when I made my deeply misguided decision to query way too soon, which of course resulted in a bunch of rejections. The worst part of this story is, I did my homework. I read all the articles that outlined what I should do, then I ignored them. What the hell was I thinking? I'll tell you EXACTLY what I was thinking. Since I’m a visual person, I decided to represent this graph...