Happy New Year

So how did it get to be six days into 2010 and 34 days since my last post??
The short answer is that for all of December I was doing a mad dash to finish my novel, Beyond the World. I had set a deadline for myself--the end of the year--and I scrambled to the final line a little past ten on the morning of New Year's Eve.
BTW is technically my third attempt at a novel, but it is the only one I have taken far enough to send out to a group of "readers." The seven people who have volunteered for this task have my deepest gratitude (and sympathy). If/when the story gets published, I'll treat them all to a champagne dinner at a suitably la-di-dah restaurant.
However, there is still work to be done. I'm counting on those--dare I say it? magnificent 7 readers--to find all the errors and problems to which, after 18 months, I am blind: gaps in the story, dropped subplots, pesky details like arbitrary name changes, blue eyes suddenly being green, spelling errors, etc.
Once the manuscript is "perfect," I need a synopsis. That means taking 60,000 words and reducing them to 250. No prob.
Then, I need a query letter so compelling that any agent will immediately sweep everything else off her desk to give my manuscript her full attention. Right.
After that is done, I have to determine where to send the query. A quick Google search tells me there are roughly 4600 literary agents lurking about. That ought to make it easy.
With a "perfect manuscript," a dynamic query letter, and a scintillating synopsis, how can I miss? The odds against me feel overwhelming, and it would be way easy to shove the thing in a drawer.
But along with a champagne dinner, I'd really like to give my "magnificent seven" acknowledgment of their support in a published book.