Some of you may recall that back in September, Agent #11 requested a partial of my novel manuscript. I did a dance for joy that day.
Well. I’m not dancing anymore. Agent #11 sent me a rejection letter.
After 18 rejections of this project (I’ll be writing about some of the others in coming weeks), I’m getting pretty thick-skinned, so I was surprised by how disappointed I was by this rejection, by how much it shook my confidence and made me question whether my novel was any good.
So I went back and reread the 15 pages I sent to Agent #11. They were pretty good. A little stale, but I chalked that up to my having read them so many times in the past six months. And, with the possible exception of Jane Austen, everything gets stale after dozens of reads in a matter of months. Right? (That is right, isn’t it? It’s not just my writing?)
I’d revise those pages, only the rejection letter wasn’t specific enough to help me realize what would make them better. I could fiddle endlessly in a blind attempt to make the story more palatable to this agent, but that would likely only succeed in alienating another agent, so at this point, I’ve decided to leave well enough alone.
I have one more partial out and one more agent to query, an agent to whom I was referred two days after I got Agent #11’s rejection (how’s that for providential?).
Granted, I don’t hold out a lot of hope for either of these options, but at least they’re out there, providing a ray of possibility in the gloom of publishing purgatory. (Insert eye-rolling here.)