Reflections on the Journey

The other day I posted about signing with literary agent Emmanuelle Morgen and so many of you chimed in with your congratulations. Thank you for that!

Heather made this comment:

Please give details on how you hung in there and kept the faith, despite the rejections! I'm in the trenches right now!

Everyone’s journey to publication is different. You hear that all the time, right? For some it happens quickly, for others slowly. Insanely talented people are rejected all the time and sometimes the scum rises to the top.

You also hear that finding an agent willing to represent you isn’t the same as “arriving.” 

This is true. If authors have “arrived,” that arrival happens when they get their first book published, when that first advance check posts to their savings account, when they receive their first fan mail from a total stranger. 

 

But even these milestones don’t feel complete without great sales and another best-seller-hopeful in the making. We’re always striving for the next big thing. So it’s logical to conclude that if we’re not content where we are (even as aspiring writers), we probably never will be content. 

And maybe that's good. We're driven people. That's why we're even attempting this. If we weren't driven, we'd be writing stories in our closets, hidden away from the world.

But don't let the fact that you don't have an agent yet steal the JOY you find in writing. We love it first. That's why we write these insanely long bodies of work. Let agents reject. They can't (shouldn't) steal the JOY we find in the process (for long, anyway).

Embracing these truths early on helped me to keep going through the query trenches, helped me through the pain of being one in a slushpile of thousands.

That, and I believed I could succeed. I knew it would take the combination of a unique, marketable idea, a ton of hard work, and great writing, but it was possible.

This assurance didn’t come with a timeline, though. I had this fuzzy idea that I’d give this aspiring writer thing twenty good years before I gave up. Okay, maybe thirty years. (Fine, I'd give it forty.)

So, it’s been four—going on five—years and I just signed with an agent. Phew. Check that off the to-do list.

So far having an agent is euphoric. And terrifying. And wonderful. And crazy. Rather like standing on the first ledge of a very high cliff.

Which leads me to this invitation: 

If you're interested in a play-by-play of my writing journey so far, click >>here<<. My former critique partner, amazing author S.J. Kincaid, offered to host me on her blog. She wanted all the gory details, so be prepared. 

I hope something I wrote here helps those of you in the trenches. I'm soon to be in the trenches again myself: the submission trenches. I'll keep you posted on which trench is worse....

Until then, happy writing!