Rejection!

Why the excitement mark, you may ask (and why on earth would I call it an excitement mark and not exclamation mark? Because I'm a dork, duh.)? One of the main reasons why I never seriously entertained the idea of publishing my book was the whole getting rejected part. I envisioned this big, messy scene, where the agent would actually call to yell at me for wasting his/her time with this crap. I didn't really understand how queries worked back then. But now that I've sent out a minimum of a million queries, I get it. And I don't know why I haven't done this earlier!

Sending out a part of the story isn't so bad. It's not as heart-pounding as I thought it would be. Many of the agents ask for ten to twenty-five pages, so it's enough for them to get a sense of me and yet not enough for them to be like, wow, this girl can't write to save her life. So hopefully my first few chapters are the best things I've ever written.

I started sending these things out last week, I think around Thursday. I've received two emails back, both rejections, but it didn't hurt as much as I thought it would. I guess the scariest part of this deal is putting myself out there, the actual act of sending out my words. It's one thing to write a query and describe what my story is about, but it's quite another to show these strangers words that I've spent months, years, really, on. I'm not sure if it's the wisdom that comes with age or what, but thinking about all these people sending back my manuscript and saying, nope, sorry, doesn't scare me as much anymore. I have other options out there, and I'm going to take the advice of the first rejection email: don't stop. And I don't plan on it.

Now that all that mushy, weird stuff is out of the way! Summer is almost here, and with all the things I have planned for it, I don't know how I'm going to do these things in three months. I usually have themed reading summers (because I'm a dork, remember), and this year, for some strange reason, I picked Summer of Russians. You know, the super depressing authors who write eight million page long books? Yeah, those Russians. And I realized that I have more than a few Russian books on my shelf, so I may get through one or two of them! Of course, that is if I ever take Valley Girl out of my DVD player (and if you know what that movie is, I love you). Plus, I have five books being held for me at the library. Yeah, I went a little nuts. Oh well. Luckily summer school schedule means I only work from nine in the morning until two in the afternoon, leaving me plenty of time for strenuous activities such as laying in bed and reading. I love summer sometimes.