On Querying

 AAAAAHHHHHHHH!!!! Now that that is out of the way...

Every time I check my email I have this expectation which I cannot quash that this will be the time that my life changes. That I will reach that goal that I have strived after for so very long. I am currently querying a novel that I worked on for almost two years while finishing my degree. As of tomorrow I will have been querying for a month. So far having sent out 33, receiving only 4 rejections to date.

I know this book is good. Even though I wrote it, when I go back and read a section to see if there are any improvements that can be made (and there always are, even if it is just a word or two) I get caught up in the story. Everyone that has read it-- family, friends, other writers that I have traded manuscripts with-- says how good it is. How engaging and engrossing and individual is it. Someone whose literary opinion I have respected and relied on for a long time, most of my life, told me that it is one of the best books they had read in years.

And yet...a month and no bites. Not even a phantom nibble. So I am forced to wonder if my readers were lying to me. Or maybe, at least the ones I know, are not as smart or as analytical in their reading as I thought they were. Or maybe I'm not.

Perhaps I am just deluding myself that I am a good writer. Or at least that I am good enough to get where I want to go. But if it is delusion I intend to keep indulging it. I have never wanted anything as much as I have to be published. To get that book deal. To have someone, somewhere say that I am good enough. To be invited to share my story around the fire as night falls.

Even as I query, I write the next one. I'll hit forty-thousand words sometime this weekend. Tomorrow if I write well. Sunday if I do so poorly. I find the work of writing is not work at all. I love every joyful, agonizing, tedious, rapturous moment of creation. And as I was told ad nauseum as a child-- and then was expected to ignored as an adult-- "do what you love and you won't work a day in your life." Well I do what I love and I still have to work, because what I love hasn't paid me yet. I believe someday it will.

Even if it doesn't I will keep doing it. Even as I query, even as I get rejections or (somehow worse) silence, I will keep writing. Because that is what writers do and I am delusional enough to think myself one of them.

And so, with another scream, aaaahhhhh (I'm much calmer now, thank you), I dive back in.

JK