Selling My Soul (In a Good Way) is a weekly journal
about my efforts to get a debut novel published.
I’ll keep this week’s musing short and sweet. Why? Because there’s not much to say. Nothing to gripe over that I haven’t complained about before*** and nothing worthy of a cheer.
Given what I’ve learned from recent rejections, a few—or some or many or all—agents are on vacation during August. Agent #52 had an auto email immediately following my query that informed me,
Thank you for your email. I will be on vacation from August 21st to September 8th. I will mostly be offline, but will be checking email once a day.
Will anything I sent be part of her “once a day” check on incoming correspondence? I suspect not!
Perhaps the only semi-good news of the week is a thoughtful rejection from a (very, very) small publisher regarding a trilogy of novellas I wrote in 2023. I still irrationally hope to find a “traditional” publishing home for them, but novellas are a hard enough “sell” for any author. And then add that the three linked stories involve Christian ministers and liberal/progressive faith perspectives. Way too many red flags on that project! His reply included,
You write well enough but the current market has shifted toward romantsy and other frankly mostly worthless works of fiction.
Soon August will be over and all the agents will return to their palatial offices and—just maybe—find my weeks or months old query and fall in love with my writing.
Dream on, Larry!
I sent out four new queries this week and the singular rejection was for my novella project (entitled WHEN YOU REMEMBER ME).
***Ya know: the “silence” of agents and/or the second-guessing about what genre FINDING JOHN MUIR best fits in and/or the many inner voices of self-doubt that whisper or shout or cackle about my writerly inadequacies.
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“Perhaps I write for no one. Perhaps for the same person children are writing for when they scrawl their names in the snow.” – Margaret Atwood
Photo by Finding Dan | Dan Grinwis on Unsplash