Selling My Soul (In a Good Way) is a weekly journal

about my efforts to get a debut novel published.

I’d prefer to write about the positive. To craft words that are life-affirming. Accentuate the positive, so said song writers Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer. It’s much healthier to embrace the writer’s battle cry of: getting a “No” from one agent or editor means you’re getting somewhere. You’re working! Hey, only writers who don’t write never get a rejection!

But.

However.

Nevertheless.

This is one of those weak-willed weeks where there’s not much in my writing world to make me happy. Or, even to have a so-so, okay, I’m-fine kind of response.

The AOR is debilitating.

In other words, the Absence Of Response.

But Larry, old chum, it’s the summer. Literary agents (all of them—of course—rich and pampered) head for the Hamptons or Aspen or Hawaii for an overpriced dose of R & R! And we just trudged by the long weekend of July Fourth, where even the most dedicated of agents and editors shut their office doors and head home to grill vegetarian hot dogs and eat expensive potato salad obtained at the local deli across from Central Park where they rub elbows with the likes of Walter Mosley or Robert DeNiro.

Everyone’s gone. Nobody’s in their luxury suite offices. Even the artificial intelligence “secretaries” have an upbeat recorded message that says to call 9-1-1 if it’s a literary emergency. Hey, on June 28, I sent out a query to a supposedly new agent (#32) and her immediate auto-reply email announced that she was outta the office until July 21. See!? Everyone’s gone. On vacation. Agents are the dearly departed, though still alive and well.

Still, this week’s “silence” felt remarkably loud. I sent my first query on Good Friday (April 18) and now, three months later, I have so damn little to show for, well, anything. Just to take my grumpy negative feelings down another notch, I went through my spreadsheet of query letters and put Rejection by seven agents who had received my query more than six weeks ago. There’s no rule that says “silence” after six weeks means rejection, but I’m enough of a realistic pessimist to read the lack of handwriting (or emails) on the literary wall.

So, write it with scratchy chalk on a cracked blackboard: this hasn’t been a great week.

As of this writing, I sent out new queries to Agents #39 and #40. No rejections.

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“There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.” – W. Somerset Maugham

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