I want someone out there to read my work and tell me I am publishable. Someone to tell me my work is viable. Worthy of being elevated from the great unwashed massed of the unpublished to the hallowed all mighty halls of The Agented and Published.
The problem with this is I have received the odd compliments and from people I don't think would bother to flatter me if they didn't have too. Really the problem is I lack any confidence at all. It probably wouldn't matter if the greatest author on earth said to me "You are totally ready! Just finish that novel and it's sure to be a best seller!" I STILL wouldn't believe them. There isn't enough confidence in the world to matter if it is all external. It has to come from with in. And isn't that where we all fail. The creeping rot disease of doubt?
I fall prey to that more than anything, the crippling elf doubt that my words will never be good enough. Once in awhile people do tell me I'm good. That my work is smooth and engaging. But there is the constant inner nagging doubt that whispers to me they are just blowing smoke.
My only solution is slog onward and hope for the best. Go forward and hope I'm not wasting yet more time. I feel like I wasted my whole life on doing all the wrong things and now I'm running out of time if I ever want to be published.
I sincerely hope this isn't the case.
Querying is hard. It's soul crushing and lonely. But absolutewrite has a great thread in the Rejection and Dejection forum called "The Daily Rejection" where people go to share their rejections and lack of responses. It's quite comforting to know you're not the only one.
ReplyDeleteMy last novel ended with a prominent agent loving the partial, requesting the full with high hopes (she said she'd "love to read the full manuscript"). Then, ultimately she gave it a pass, saying the writing was of the calibre she'd expect in a client but the book wasn't unique enough to stand out in the marketplace.
The whole experience, from first query to last took about eight months. I revised the book twice with massive overhauls and ultimately it fell a bit short. But...in the end, someone told me my writing, my voice and all were not only good they were great! In spite of the fact it was all a failure I managed to pull a positive out of it. My next book will NOT get lost on a shelf of similar titles. It may have the opposite problem of being TOO out there but I doubt it. Far from being a downer I found the final rejection all the more reason to kick things into another gear.
Now, looking back at all I just wrote I think I'll have to make it into a blog post. Thanks for being my first blog follower! If you want a semi-educated opinion on your writing I'd be glad to have a look, especially if you'd like to reciprocate.
Thanks for the story! I wonder a lot about what will happen to Tx3 when it is finally out there in the world on the desks of agents abd I'm hoping it won't be all bad news!
ReplyDeleteI do have more ideas, lots of them, but first things first.
Man! There is no contact thingie on Blogspot!
ReplyDeleteTx3 isn't really uh... typed yet... but when it is yeah! I have a short mental list of people I want to beta!
Plus I'm going to be starting a steampunkish online project- I need to get an outline going... but it's fiction and I'll be posting on wordpress