While You're Waiting to Succeed, Try, Try Again

Before I started querying, many of my writing friends told me that I needed to work on a new project while I was querying, because otherwise I would be filled with enough anxiety to chew my fingernails to their cuticles. I didn't believe them--or I guess I did believe them, but I assumed that that was their experience, but it wouldn't happen to me.

Ha.

As we learned last week, querying has reduced my mind to a never-ending scream. I'll wake up certain that today is the day, today is the day I'll hear back from an agent and receive an offer of representation, but as the day dwindles, my confidence shifts into certainty that I will not hear back from an agent today, and when I do hear back from them, it will be a rejection. I'll start imagining where I might be when I receive the email: at work, in my car, in the coffee shop. I don't consider myself superstitious, but I am trying to stop doing this, because it always seems that when you imagine something happening a certain way, it never ends up actually happening that way. Whichever way the emails go, I want to be surprised by their arrival, so I've set myself the impossible task of forgetting about them.

To achieve this, I've decided to listen to my writing friends and start a new project. I won't tell you the title, because I have this irrational fear of the title being stolen, but it has a lovely acronym, ROAD, which happened entirely by accident, so I'll be referring to it as that for the time being.

ROAD is a sapphic epic fantasy, so if you like Priory of the Orange Tree, you'll probably like it. WASI, the book I'm currently querying, is a literary urban fantasy, so as you might imagine, ROAD is wildly different; it has a much larger scope, but like all my stories, it's structured in the most complicated way possible, because, I don't know, I think my brain is a masochist. With this story, I really just wanted to write something fun, but less than one chapter in, my brain pivoted to structuring the story into multiple parts with multiple timelines garnished with added surprise sections that I can't even explain, so in other words, you can totally tell this book is being written by a neurotic INTJ.

Complaints aside, I adore ROAD so far. I know that we writers are always afraid of loving our own writing, because we don't want to be egotistical, but if we're being honest, being a creative requires us to be egotistical: if we didn't all secretly think our stories were the best thing since Lord of the Rings, we wouldn't have the stamina to break into this industry. I think we all know that, deep down, but none of us are going to say it, because then, once we do get published, we've invited everyone to be hyper-critical of our work, and we've essentially signed the death warrant for any future collaborations, because no one wants to work with self-admitted egoists.

I think there's a paradoxical truth inside every creative, though, in that we are all egoists filled with perpetual self-loathing. For example, I'm incredibly proud of WASI, but now that its future is off being determined by a series of people I don't know, I feel like a mother who has sent her child off to college: not only am I terrified of the way WASI will be judged, but I'm also violently aware that when people judge WASI, they will also be judging me, and however much I adore ROAD right now, I know that when ROAD is ready to go on submission, I'll feel exactly the same way.

So that's the self-loathing half of it, but the egotism half of it is that even knowing this, I've still decided that this week I'll be querying five more agents, writing the first 12th of ROAD, and hoping hoping hoping that I'll start hearing back from agents...and that I'll be hearing good news.

In the meantime, wish me luck--the good kind, as always--and I will wish the same for you.