The Next Circle of Hell, Vol. 2

SO EXCITED FOR YOU POLISH!!!

I’m traveling this weekend but I hope your plans include celebrating like crayzayyyy, Polish!!!! I mean, Polish’s friend...

I'm cocktail making tomorrow with my book club buddies. Tonight, I'm by myself, so plan to chill with some light edits and wine. I should state that my weekend plans don't always revolve around alcohol!

I'm going to the theatre tonight. It's 9am on Saturday here and I woke up hours ago, all motivated to start a new book. So, of course, all I've done so far is read Christmas catalogues and use social media ...

I'm just nursing a sick cat and playing a LOT of Death Stranding for the weekend. Somewhere in there I might go TOTALLY gonzo crazy and rake some leaves. Somebody stop me, I'm outta' control.

Woah, Shoeless, slow down. I don't mean to brag, but I'll be keeping my littles from tearing each other and or the house apart, so bring out the party hats The weather is getting cold here and it gets harder and harder to keep everyone happy, so some days during the weekend I feel like I need to be juggling and putting on a full-scale broadway musical to keep them happy. Ah well.

Yesssss, Polish! Very excited for you!

I’ll be doing the day job (editing) most of the weekend and snatching time to write when I can. And seeing a movie to review, but really that’s all about getting to eat popcorn with lots of fake butter.

Ugh, so a couple of hours ago I got my second round of edits back on my nightmare nervous breakdown book, and I've decided not to touch them until tomorrow. I've given myself such a complex about this particular manuscript that I just want it all to be over (but maybe if they sent me a pretty cover to motivate me, I'd feel better - my cover brief was submitted weeks ago!).

I've always thought it was a bit unusual how people kept talking about mental health care and self-care for authors, but now I totally get it!

I have three other books to work on at the moment, and I'm MUCH happier with all of them than I am with this one that's coming out soon …

Shoeless - your poor cat. Because it's spring here (and I live surrounded by bushland) all of the birds are fighting for territory, and the cat we joint-own with the neighbour gets attacked by a rabid currawong every time he steps outside. He's a HUGE cat, but he's completely traumatised at the moment.

Hi all!

Last time I was here, I was sharing my news of an agent sign. After fruitlessly querying three versions of MS1 for approximately two years, I gleaned what I could from that experience, took all that knowledge, and applied it to MS2. Got several agent offers in a small amount of queries over two weeks. Yay! Buuuuut..... sub. Well, sub has been a different animal, folks. What agents loved, editors did not. At least not enough to bring it to acquisitions. I had one R&R, but the suggestions were.... interesting to say the least, and my agent felt that R&Rs typically don't work out, and if the publisher wanted to work with me, they should pay me. Fair enough.

I'm halfway through second rounds with no bites, and my agent hinted that's the end. I'm considering going to small publishers next.

I do realize that your chances of bagging a deal after an agent are still pretty small, I guess what I'm having trouble digesting is the disconnect between how popular the book was with agents, and how unpopular it was with editors.... almost as if they don't speak to each other, LOL.

I'd love to learn what went wrong here so that, like with MS1, I can try to correct my mistakes, however, whereas I found plenty of information online with what agents are looking for, what editors want remains a mystery since they don't tend to talk as much as agents.

Halfway though MS3 but definitely having a crisis of faith and pretty certain this one will go the way of MS1 and MS2.

Hope you're all having better days!

Sending you good thoughts, Kensi! I hope everything works out in your second round. You never know! Keep us updated!

Thanks!!

Hi Kensi, sorry to hear you're hitting another obstacle. It is really hard to second guess the market, so it's probably best not to try. As others said, try to let it go and write MS3 how you want. You have the huge advantage of an agent to help you with that for the first time. She can be a very helpful early reader. You can go to small publishers with MS2 but think very hard about whether that's where you want to debut. If your heart is in getting the book out there soon, okay. But if you really truly want to debut with a bigger publisher, it might be better to keep up the persistence and determination you've already shown and pour your resources into MS3. You're obviously getting close!

Sonya Heaney said:

Shoeless - your poor cat.

Click to expand...

Unfortunately, over the evening, it transitioned to poor cats.

The kitten stopped eating and got completely lethargic. We brought him into the vet this morning and found out he was running a temperature of 41 C, or 105F. They pumped him full of anti-nausea medication, antibiotics, urgent care food and put him through fluid therapy. We're waiting on the blood test results, and HOPING that something comes up, because if it does, that's likely to mean the antibiotics will do the trick. We're hoping it's not FIP, Feline Infectious Peritonitis, which has a 100% mortality rate, and is genetic, so nothing can be done. Unfortunately FIP has similar symptoms to what the kitten is experiencing now, so we're just hoping the blood test will come out positive and they'll say "Yup, he's got a bug." If his blood is clean and he's got these symptoms, that points more towards FIP.

Noooo kitties Fingers crossed for him.

Oh noooo, Shoeless! I hope your cats are fine and it's not FIP. What an awful time for the kitty, and for you and your fam! Fingers crossed they improve very soon.

Kensi - That's tough... I've been in the same boat, and it was honestly quite a blow to go from the high of multiple agent offers to getting nothing but rejections from editors. Unfortunately, there isn't much we can do as writers, aside from keep on writing, but it's a tough journey for sure, and I hope you get good news soon.

Thinking good thoughts for the kitties!!!

Shoeless, crossing everything for your kitty. What a scary time, but at least you know you’re doing everything you can. I felt very lucky when my kittens made it out of kittenhood intact.

Kensi, I’m sorry. That’s incredibly frustrating, and I’m forever worried about being the victim of a similar disconnect. I read somewhere that booksellers are the closest to book buyers, editors second closest, and then come agents, so agents might be out of the loop about market shifts. But those shifts are incredibly unpredictable, and I doubt anyone has a complete handle on them. Booksellers seemed to like my debut book (they gave it an honor), but the buyers? Not so much, or anyway they didn’t buy it in droves. Maybe it was the election, or something in the air that year, or maybe it just wasn’t a great book. Who knows?

I think editors are doing a lot of guessing and going with their gut, too. I have made certain changes to write for the market, sometimes with success and sometimes not, but I think that way lies madness if you take it too far. In the end I’d rather just write what I want to read.

polish, yayyyyyy! I can't wait for details!

Shoeless, so sorry about the kitties. My Charlie was in cat hospital a few months ago and I really thought I was going to lose him. Thinking of you.

Kensi, if it helps, your story is really common. I didn't sell my first agented manuscript and, from what I gather, the majority of authors don't. There are books that have agents falling out of their chairs that flop, and books that only get one offer that sell millions. The problem isn't that agents or editors are bad at their jobs or don't connect, it's that books are incredibly subjective and deciding which manuscripts will do well is more of an art than a science. We can't control that, so all we can do is keep writing until we find something that sticks.

Shoeless, I'm so sorry. We're all hoping you get good news about your kitten soon.

Polish, I'm so glad to hear rhings arwe going well, and looking forward to hearing more.

Kensi, sorry to hear about MS2 not getting snapped up. I've heard similar stories about good books not getting to acquisitions purely because of things as random as they had already bought something vaguely similar in the last few months (happened to me), or 'too many books with elements of horror lately'. Those shifts and trends in acquisitions are beyond our merely mortal ken. It's entirely possible nothing is wrong with your book and it's just the wrong thing at the wrong time.

Shoeless, I am sending all good thoughts to your kitty and very much hoping it's a bug and not FIP. What an awful time for you, especially after recently losing your older cat. Thinking of you.

Kensi, I'm sorry about your MS. As the others have said, this is sadly so common, and agents aren't privy to all the information editors have (such as other books they're interested in which may be competition) so can make mistakes, or misjudge. Unfortunately there are a whole host of random factors which can work against - or, indeed, for - an author.

Fingers crossed for your kitty, Shoeless!!!! I hope y'all get good news.
My cat has also been trying his very best bankrupt me/put himself in the hospital lately. <3 <3 <3 It's so hard.

And popping in to chime along with everyone else, Kensi. I'm in a similar boat, where my first MS didn't sell and neither did my second. Though book 2 did earn a R&R that I agreed with, so I did it. And we're waiting to see how that pans out. I have book 3 ready to dive into sub basically the second we get a pass on the R&R, but my agent wants to sub to this same editor if they do pass on book 2, so we're waiting.

I think as we go through books that don't sell, we do get more and more desperate to write something "for the market" but I don't know of that ever working, for anyone. The zeitgeist is like a trap a book falls into, not the other way around, and there's no predicting any of it. It sucks. Basically everything about publishing sucks lol.

Except for the moments when you get that sweet, sweet YES.

Thank you! Yes, it is a wake up, that's for sure. Wake up to a nightmare

Good thoughts for the kitty!! I've had sick kittens (I foster a lot) and it's the worst. Sounds like she's getting the best of care.

Shoeless, I hope your kitties are OK!!! It's entirely possible they just have a random cat illness. The same thing happened to my cat when he was around one, went scarily lethargic/feverish and the emergency vet couldn't find anything wrong with him. But he just needed a couple of days to sleep and then was OK. I really hope it's something similar. It's just so horrible when the kitties can't tell you what's wrong. Sending huge hugs.

I think we may be okay with the kitten. The vet said the blood tests didn't point out anything that would indicate FIP, though she did note he's a little anemic, and his kidney levels were a little unusual, though not dangerous yet. We've been pretty diligent about giving him his antibiotic, and he went in for another round of fluid therapy just to be on the safe side, but he's eating again and when my wife was cuddling him and dangled a toy in front of him his eyes were sharp and focused and he had enough energy to try to play with it, so we're hoping he'll be fine.