The Daily Rejection, Vol. 2

JJ, congrats on that flash fiction!

Jen: waiting is the hardest part, and that seems to be all us writers ever do: wait.

Well, it helps to hear I'm not the only one with radio silence. Maybe it's simply summertime and things will pick up in Sept.

JJ - Congratulations! It sounds interesting. I need to check it out.

Jeneral - I can see why an R&R would magnify the waiting anxiety. But really, this time of year makes it hard to compare to other times. Hang in there!


I just checked QT for the 3 agents who have my query and didn't expect to see much activity since two are No response means No, but out of those two, one has skipped over me with a full request for someone else and the other has skipped over me with a rejection for someone else, so perhaps I'm in a maybe pile with that one. Or perhaps I'll never hear either way. I checked my spam folder and nada. I need to remember to check that more often.

PSA: People, check your spam folders.

The third agent - the agent who seems best suited for ALL my work, esp. the current ms and the next - doesn't appear to have gotten to mine yet, and I need to send more queries out before he does because if he rejects, I will be very, very sad and won't feel like sending any more out for a while.

Noranne - wow fantastic time! I could maybe do that biking. *Maybe* I wish I were a runner but I've never busted six or seven miles. So kudos

Jeneral - YEP. Same place you are. Submitted, now waiting for inevitable, sad rejection. Plus I went and didn't label my one chapter submission appropriately. Argh.

Raggededge - Send out some queries! That way you won't be quite so hung up on Mr. Right just in case he isn't But I understand what it's like living in the depths of queryhell. So hang in there!

Got some fabulous Beta advice from the wonderful Moonchild. Sometimes you live in the MS so long, you're too close to even read it! You read what you think you wrote, not what you actually wrote. I'm going to let that sit for a week before I apply all the edits. Even this week+ break I had from that MS made the issues so much clearer, so I'm going to save it for next weekend to give me a little more space from it.

re: PitchWars. I went and spent too much time on submitting it (don't get me wrong, it's a valuable thing for many people, I just feel like it's gambling to a degree, and I could be using the three hours I spent researching who to submit too ((when I said I wouldn't do that this time)) to actually write). Suppose I could be more positive though. I did re-write my query to be more accurate to the now-completed story from when I originally wrote my query, oh say a year ago.

Well anyway... I'm going to do some lazy summer reading and summer writing

Hi, guys. Miss me?

Sorry I kind of vaporized there for a while. Life ganged up on me (and I got lost in the revision cave) and I ended up having to run flat out just to get the necessities (and the revision) done. And then I wanted to catch up on the thread, which around here is a looming task in itself.

One good thing, the expletive-deleted revision is done. Well, except for one tiny naggling thing (finding a substitute expletive, as it happens), but if I had to go to press tomorrow with that unchanged, nobody but me would know the difference. The enormous pile of notes and tape flags, many of them left over from my last revision pass, is gone, and I'm feeling pretty good about that.


A catch-up post at this point would just be silly, but I'm glad to see y'all again. Congrats, condolences, WTFs and good luck as appropriate.

Hey Liz! Welcome back and congrats on finishing your revision! What a relief that must be.

***
Update on Pitch Wars -

A couple hours ago I received an email in my query-only account. It was from twitter. Twitter = #pitchwars = IMUSTHAVEGOTTENAREQUEST. Alas, it was twitter telling me the Olympic games have begun.

The past 20 minutes I've been clicking refresh on all the pitch wars hash tags and mentors I subbed to.

Really I need to... go do something... else.

Good luck everyone in PW!!

Jeneral said:

We know. We've gotten enough rejections to figure that out!

Click to expand...

Lol, I'm up to 137 short story rejections. I think I had something like 40 or 50 before I got an acceptance. I hope that plus the previous failed querying has prepped me to handle all the rejections I'll get when I finish polishing up this current manuscript and start querying it.

Hi guys and pitch wars mentees in particular : ) crickets for me on pitchwars so far but not complaining as posting this from hospital with a functional brain after v successful surgery : ) yay!

Keep us posted on pitchwars requests guys ...will have fingers crossed for you!

Maggie, I'm glad you checked in! I've been thinking about you and hoping your surgery went well. <3

Maggie - That's excellent news! I'm so relieved, and I pray you continue to do well. It certainly puts our submitting worries in perspective.

Liz_V - Hello and welcome back! I think I was probably on hiatus when you started posting, and you went on hiatus when I returned. Kudos on finishing the revision! That's HUGE. I usually keep all my revision notes as bullet points in one or two Word docs and I LOVE transferring those bullet points to the bottom of the page, under the "Done" header.

JJ - I've been around long enough to see you start getting short story acceptances as you persevered in learning the craft and submitting, and I've been encouraged by that. Go you!

October - I'm sorry the Twitter/email excitement didn't have more substance, but hopefully one day soon it will! And you're absolutely right that my "Mr Right" may not be. I get that. And I'm really pleased with the agents who have my partial and full right now. I'd be happy to learn more about any of them.


I had a good brainstorming session for WIP today, sitting outside on my patio while staring into the trees and listening to the hum of the insects. Nature helps me get to core ideas faster than almost anything else.

Other writing things I should do today: work on my budding website and get a couple queries ready, but I'm dragging my feet on those. Laundry and finances are almost more appealing...

OctoberLee - Silly Twitter. Doesn't it know there are novels being pitched?

MaggieMc - Yay on successful surgery! Hope the recovery process goes smoothly.

RE - Resist the call of the laundry! It'll tempt you away from writing stuff every time....

Hope everyone had a good weekend! Mine was lovely. Had a great mini vacation, and I gave myself permission to take a vacation from writing as well. That was nice. Usually I feel so guilty when I go more than a day or two without writing, but now I feel ready to get back to it.

On the other hand, I got 3 Rs this weekend (well, 2 form Rs and one CNR timeout) so I am feeling dispirited about MS6 and querying and why I am even bothering. Think I will try to re-work the query a bit before I send out any revenge queries. I haven't gotten anything but silence or form R to the last 20 or so, which probably means time to re-evaluate!

Maggie - glad you are okay! Yep your situation definitely puts things in perspective re: the importance of pitchwars.

Sounds like crickets all around for pitchwars. Hope someone gets some sort of request. But a request might be even worse, knowing they're picking one out of 80+ pitches. Ahhh so depressing. AND THEN... google+ had the nerve to send me an email to my queries-only email. Le sigh. Why do I have to unsubscribe to these things I didn't know I ever subscribed to in the first place?

Noranne - YES for revenge queries!

Happy Monday y'all. It's all... downhill? from here...

RaggedEdge said:

JJ - I've been around long enough to see you start getting short story acceptances as you persevered in learning the craft and submitting, and I've been encouraged by that. Go you!

Click to expand...

Thanks, RE!

I still don't know if writing shorts will help when it comes to querying a novel, but they've brought plenty of other benefits. It was a struggle at first, but totally worth it!

noranne - Have some R cinnamon rolls. Warm from the oven!


I should be writing. Eh, worked today. Maybe tomorrow....

Glad your surgery went well, Maggie.

And yay for mini-vacations.

I have... many short story rejections with rather less acceptances. Obviously I'm not doing very well at the 'getting better' thing.

I'm nerding it up atm preparing for a Star Wars RPG and creating my character is fun. The backstory is completely over the top - the character is Awesome and Everything Happens to him, and that is just not allowed in 'real' stories these days xD It's a very nice break from having to make everything plot-perfect and believable

Hi everyone. I'm sure you don't remember me but I posted in here a couple of times earlier in the year, hoping it would encourage me to keep querying. It didn't and I ended up getting sucked into work again but I'm planning to start up again soon.

Does anyone else find that they obsess over their inbox when they first send out queries and then suddenly forget all about it? Maybe it depends on how busy you are. I only sent out a few queries so not much to log, but I had to search through my emails to find the late replies rejections. Probably bad form on my part!

Never. I never forget about my inbox. I might forget specific queries once I've closed them out, and when I get that R six months later I forgot I'd queried that agent, but the inbox is eternal. It is forever.

PitchWars has been fun. I obsessed for a couple days, now I'm starting to chill out about it and work on my WIP, which is what I should be doing. We're not really supposed to talk about the status of our inbox though, as some mentors are sending out requests quickly while others are waiting, and no one wants to compare inboxes, especially across genres. So I won't say anything about the state of my inbox until the pics are made later this month.

Though it is at least keeping me from Twitter-stalking the agents who have my stuff on a near-constant basis. So that's something?

Tamlyn said:

I have... many short story rejections with rather less acceptances. Obviously I'm not doing very well at the 'getting better' thing.

Click to expand...

I dunno. I'm quite sure I've gotten better since my first sale, but you wouldn't know it from my (lack of) acceptances. The market is a weird, weird thing.

Hi, mckey! Actually, I don't obsess over my inbox at all; once I hit Send, that sucker's done as far as I'm concerned. (Now, if I get some reason to hope, like making the second round with a short story, then the obsessing comes on, big time. But for initial contacts, once I've done my bit, I usually drop it from my attention completely.)

Jeneral -

You guys, it's been a week since I submitted my R&R and I can't STOP staring at my inbox.

I need an intervention. Or more wine.

I think it was because I was so busy and the agents I sent to were good agents, but no one that I thought was this perfect fit. If not I'm sure I would have obsessed much more!
I just contacted an agent and have been checking emails more than necessary.

Ahhh I think I would be the same with an R and R!

You hear that --- it's the sound of crickets...

I've been revising my manuscript this year. Funny but now that it's "ready" in a literary way, I expect agents to get back to me sooner -

Makes perfect sense!

Liz, that's actually a really good point. If I'm just sending out queries, NBD, I don't check my inbox obsessively. But now that I'm waiting on an R&R or two and doing PitchWars, it's constant.

So January, I feel your pain! I had another mini-tantrum last Friday, my husband asked how long it's been since I sent the R&R back. When I told him three weeks, he told me to STFU and quit talking to him.

*makes room for Jeneral in the waiting wine bunker, shares inbox periscope*

I know logically I should expect a wait similar to the first time around. I wonder when my logic will catch up to my writer nerves lol. Probably never.

january, Jeneral - If I had an R&R pending, I'd probably be clinging to my inbox like a limpet! Have more wine.


This weather needs to cool down, darn it. I got up early to go for a run (well, shuffle), but not early enough. I'm not sure there is early enough, unless I go while it's actually dark.