triumph and disaster

So, we persuade ourselves we are now strong, resilient, optimistic, determined - the list of positive adjectives is endless - and won't be struck down by the rejection emails informing us our sample chapters don't quite grab the reader's imagination in the way that's required for the agency to represent us. We tell ourselves that. After all, some burgeoning robustness must surface after considerable experience of having our work turned down.

Was it only yesterday that I blogged about the process of submitting by email? When I laughingly listed the variations in what agents require? That I stated

my intent to immerse myself in my next novel before the 'thanks but no thanks'

responses flooded my inbox?

And was it only this morning that I cheerfully checked through an online list of literary agents, adding more to my list of those who accept submissions by email?

What is clearer is that it was this

afternoon, when I interrupted my online browsing to check my emails and there it was: the first rejection. So gently worded yet so wounding.

As is so often the case, I went through the thought process: hasn't grabbed her imagination, won't grab anyone's imagination. Give up. Forget the lovely comments others have made about your writing, pay attention only to the agents to whom you have ascribed a god-like importance.

Apply for job cleaning the trams when they eventually hit Edinburgh. Become a celestial domestic animal producing four course dinners served in an immaculately cleaned and cared for flat. Go trekking in Nepal in the hope of developing a deeper philosophy enabling yourself to treat triumph and disaster as the same, as Rudyard Kipling urged.

The next step was to phone home in search of sympathy and encouragement to keep going. Then, still in need of a listening ear, an offload to fellow writer at my place of writing. Then the consumption of half a bar of chocolate abandoned by someone. More online browsing. Why limit myself to 12 rejections, when there could be 30?

And then, having completed my list of potential rejectors, a fruitless if brief search for retail therapy which resulted in the purchase of a bag of chocolate-coated peanuts but no shoes.

Wounds heal. By tomorrow I will be more detached. What is clear, though, is that the sooner I return to working on the book I keep talking about finishing, the better. An old lover is more easily forgotten when a new one takes his place.

Jane