Once upon a time I finished a manuscript, let it rest, revised it, did
everything I could to make it as good as can be, and decided it was
worth sending out to query.
I'd done my homework (with the exception of how to create a blinder of a query letter - more on that in another post). I had read the advice of PEOPLE, who had BOOKS of their own. I had searched out people who I felt would enjoy my subject/style. I even waited until there was a social media MOVEMENT based around my genre, that being the #YesGayYA hashtag. I knew what to expect - the greatest authors in the world all receive multiple rejections. It WILL NOT make it through on the first try. I was ready. The publishing world was Johnny of the Cobra-Kai Dojo and I was Daniel-san, ready to deliver a crane kick right to its face.
Then something weird happened.
I got a poor-to-mild response from maybe 3 agents and...I stopped. I gave up on sending out the queries I swore to keep barraging the market with. I can't really explain why. I was prepared for exactly this outcome. I had specifically planned for anywhere up to 50 rejections before I considered giving up.
But I stopped anyway. Why?
I wasn't mad or crushed or anything like that. I wasn't convinced that the world was against me and that nobody could see my special snowflake-diamond-flower uniqueness amongst a sea of HACKS. That's called professional jealousy, or not even in my case - I am not a professional, so technically it's just being a 'stonking great git'. I'm nothing if not acutely aware of how un-special and non-prodigious I am.
That's not to say that I had a crisis of confidence, either. It is possible to think yourself a decent writer that people may want to spend some time escaping to outer space with while NOT believing you're Fiction Jesus, here to save literature from its sins. Joke about cruci-fiction here.
It might be fair to say I had the perfectly natural reaction of 'Oh, I might be doing something wrong, I had better press pause on this process and make sure'. There was no reason that pause had to last a year, though. And it did.
I wasn't idle in that time. I set about creating the comic pages that I've been uploading to this blog, which was fun and I hope to continue. I began work on a new novel which I am almost finished and hope to shop around shortly. I learned to draw. I racked up an absolute mountain of creative development and project options.
But I didn't come back to the novel until now. Why?
I've had good feedback from beta readers and Internet strangers who agreed to critique chapters. That helped. I heard stories of people I'd been following on twitter about their success. Also very helpful. I read a couple of great books that inspired me to try and join the authorship ranks. I also read some terrible ones that I was absolutely SURE I could do better than. Each is equally inspiring in its way.
Still, it all just equates to tiny incidents. There's no one unifying and powerful force that got me back to the email account and pressing the 'send' button again.
There might be one little thing I did, though, that made me feel like I was doing the right thing. When you leave a manuscript for a long time, there's a tendency to come back to it and notice all the little errors and mistakes. Authors often talk about how they went back to some of their early works and could read them, such was their cringeworthy-ness. Time puts distance between you and your own work. You lose that thing in your head that says 'this is the way I KNOW everything goes' and it suddenly becomes 'Hey, dude who wrote this a year ago...how did this go, again?' It's a new perspective on your own work.
And when I sat down to read Crisis Generation again - without a red pen to bully me through the pages, just a comfy chair and a cup of coffee - something weird happened. I wasn't embarrassed. I didn't cringe (much). It wasnt perfect, by any means, but the story was better than even I remembered. This was an MS I could feel comfortable putting forward and saying 'I like this, and I think you will, too.'
So, everyone, my point follows. There's an old saying that no elegant plan ever survives contact with the battlefield. This is definitely true of fiction, and of querying agents. No matter how you think it will go, no matter what scenarios you prepare for - you will still be caught off guard.
It's no good me telling you to keep at it no matter what, though you should. I told myself that. It didn't work. It's no good reading about JK Rowling's 20-odd rejections before someone bit, because JK Rowling is less an author than she is a mythical superbeing from another planet with an alien skill for snatching the attention of entire generations.
All you can do is get on the Query Go Round and see where it takes you. Persistence will help. Belief in yourself will help. Not believing in yourself too much will also help.
The only thing that doesn't help at all is not doing it.
Wish me luck. And go and check out the art post if you haven't already! It's got purdy pitchers in it.
**Disclaimer: Written on my phone. Formatting errors and Americanisations may have happened.
I'd done my homework (with the exception of how to create a blinder of a query letter - more on that in another post). I had read the advice of PEOPLE, who had BOOKS of their own. I had searched out people who I felt would enjoy my subject/style. I even waited until there was a social media MOVEMENT based around my genre, that being the #YesGayYA hashtag. I knew what to expect - the greatest authors in the world all receive multiple rejections. It WILL NOT make it through on the first try. I was ready. The publishing world was Johnny of the Cobra-Kai Dojo and I was Daniel-san, ready to deliver a crane kick right to its face.
Then something weird happened.
I got a poor-to-mild response from maybe 3 agents and...I stopped. I gave up on sending out the queries I swore to keep barraging the market with. I can't really explain why. I was prepared for exactly this outcome. I had specifically planned for anywhere up to 50 rejections before I considered giving up.
But I stopped anyway. Why?
I wasn't mad or crushed or anything like that. I wasn't convinced that the world was against me and that nobody could see my special snowflake-diamond-flower uniqueness amongst a sea of HACKS. That's called professional jealousy, or not even in my case - I am not a professional, so technically it's just being a 'stonking great git'. I'm nothing if not acutely aware of how un-special and non-prodigious I am.
That's not to say that I had a crisis of confidence, either. It is possible to think yourself a decent writer that people may want to spend some time escaping to outer space with while NOT believing you're Fiction Jesus, here to save literature from its sins. Joke about cruci-fiction here.
It might be fair to say I had the perfectly natural reaction of 'Oh, I might be doing something wrong, I had better press pause on this process and make sure'. There was no reason that pause had to last a year, though. And it did.
I wasn't idle in that time. I set about creating the comic pages that I've been uploading to this blog, which was fun and I hope to continue. I began work on a new novel which I am almost finished and hope to shop around shortly. I learned to draw. I racked up an absolute mountain of creative development and project options.
But I didn't come back to the novel until now. Why?
I've had good feedback from beta readers and Internet strangers who agreed to critique chapters. That helped. I heard stories of people I'd been following on twitter about their success. Also very helpful. I read a couple of great books that inspired me to try and join the authorship ranks. I also read some terrible ones that I was absolutely SURE I could do better than. Each is equally inspiring in its way.
Still, it all just equates to tiny incidents. There's no one unifying and powerful force that got me back to the email account and pressing the 'send' button again.
There might be one little thing I did, though, that made me feel like I was doing the right thing. When you leave a manuscript for a long time, there's a tendency to come back to it and notice all the little errors and mistakes. Authors often talk about how they went back to some of their early works and could read them, such was their cringeworthy-ness. Time puts distance between you and your own work. You lose that thing in your head that says 'this is the way I KNOW everything goes' and it suddenly becomes 'Hey, dude who wrote this a year ago...how did this go, again?' It's a new perspective on your own work.
And when I sat down to read Crisis Generation again - without a red pen to bully me through the pages, just a comfy chair and a cup of coffee - something weird happened. I wasn't embarrassed. I didn't cringe (much). It wasnt perfect, by any means, but the story was better than even I remembered. This was an MS I could feel comfortable putting forward and saying 'I like this, and I think you will, too.'
So, everyone, my point follows. There's an old saying that no elegant plan ever survives contact with the battlefield. This is definitely true of fiction, and of querying agents. No matter how you think it will go, no matter what scenarios you prepare for - you will still be caught off guard.
It's no good me telling you to keep at it no matter what, though you should. I told myself that. It didn't work. It's no good reading about JK Rowling's 20-odd rejections before someone bit, because JK Rowling is less an author than she is a mythical superbeing from another planet with an alien skill for snatching the attention of entire generations.
All you can do is get on the Query Go Round and see where it takes you. Persistence will help. Belief in yourself will help. Not believing in yourself too much will also help.
The only thing that doesn't help at all is not doing it.
Wish me luck. And go and check out the art post if you haven't already! It's got purdy pitchers in it.
**Disclaimer: Written on my phone. Formatting errors and Americanisations may have happened.
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