Passed

Well, I got the word today - my once possible future agent wrote to say she was passing on my book. There was a moment of disappointment there, but I honestly would have been far more surprised if she had offered to represent me. She did give a brief explanation of why she was passing, and honestly it's hard to argue her point because she zeroed in on something that I also felt needed to be better.

This is something that I really think you have to be a writer to appreciate, but it's a little masochistic to be a writer who tries to get something published -- you simply are going to get rejected time and time again, and yet you just keep putting yourself in situations where you know you're probably going to get rejected. It's just how it works. No matter how hard you work or how good you think your work turns out to be, everything is subjective. And the simple fact here is that if I couldn't make her love it? Either she wasn't the right person for the job, or the manuscript wasn't ready yet. I'd say it's probably a little bit of both.

Honestly, I'm okay with this. I'm really very happy to get this news before the school year ends so I can get a more complete feeling of closure without having one more question mark hanging over my head as the summer begins, and when it comes to doing some rewrites on the manuscript, I now have a definite direction to take.

So I'm writing this to inform anyone curious about this as to what happened. I'm not writing this to have people tell me how sorry they are for me. Please don't feel sorry for me here. Even if it didn't work out this time, I've still reached a point in the process that many people never reach. I know I'm in a good position to continue pursuing this, and I know what I need to do to make the next time a better possibility. And let's remember that in the big picture, I haven't lost anything at all. Life is still good.