I sent out a second batch of query letters last month, and waiting to hear back has been harder than I expected. It’s not that I didn’t think querying would be stressful! But I was so focused on getting to this point at all, and so terrified of quitting before I got here, that waiting for someone else to tell me yes or no sounded positively breezy.
Except I really do want to be traditionally published. And at the end of the day that’s not up to me. Unless, actually, it is? Unless my query letter (350 words, 20+ drafts, countless hours of my life) is conveying the wrong things about my story. Unless my synopsis is bad. Unless the beginning of my book isn’t hooky/funny/good enough to keep agents reading. Unless readers just aren’t interested in a human/alien romance, or an alien invasion in a contemporary setting. Unless I haven’t done enough to convince someone that my full manuscript might be a worth a read.
Publishing is subjective. It’s a numbers game. It’s down to luck. It has to be the right agent, the right book, the right time. It’s subjective. Rejections are inevitable. Every single writer gets rejections. A rejection doesn’t mean that your work isn’t valuable, or that it isn’t good.
I can, and often do, believe all of that. I think my work is good. I think it’s funny and sincere, and since it’s something I’d want to read I even think it might be marketable. And publishing really, really is subjective—but I don’t think it follows that all writing is equally polished, or equally publishable. And I know that agents DO receive low-quality submissions. So my great and terrible fear is that my rejected submission has been chucked onto an “Oof, yikes, immediate no” garbage heap, rather than placed gently in a recycling bin labeled “Cool idea, well-written, not for me.” Of course, in order to believe the garbage heap theory, I’d have to discount quite a bit of positive feedback from very trusted sources. Which would make me kind of a lousy friend and partner, right? But then my brain goes, yes but what if they were just being nice/are actually delusional/had a brief psychotic break for the exact amount of time it took them to read my novel????
So that’s all exhausting! But I’m not gonna stop querying, at least not for a while, so I’ll get used to it. I’ve got a lot of questions about next steps—at how many form rejections should I completely rethink my materials? At what number should I shelve this project and hope for the next one? How many times should I blog about something that might end in failure?—but I’m hoping I’ll have the answers by the time I need them. I also think having another project will help. I can’t seem to get a new novel started just yet, but I keep saying I’d like to get back into painting and maybe this is my week!
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