Got another rejection today. Not a bad one, just a form rejection (a little annoying since it was on a full. Four hundred pages and that’s all the agent can say?). Anyway, didn’t really bother me too much. At this point, I am so tired of looking and thinking about this book, my feelings were rather ambivalent. I have one more submission out there and when it gets rejected, I think I will retire the darn thing.
What are we told over and over about the time spent during submissions? Write, write, write. And that is what I have been doing. I’ve written one complete ms, nearly finished another and started a new one. While that is productive, the side affect is that my enthusiasm is for the WIP I’m currently working on, a “love the one you’re with” kind of deal. As time goes by, I find it harder and harder to focus on the other ms. I’ve been submitting it for well over a year now and like a favorite song that has been played to death, I’m tired of it. Miss Snark says a writer should give an ms a 100 rejections before giving up.
Ughhh….. I’m at maybe thirty. To get to one hundred, well, I don’t want to contemplate it.
So I’m keeping my focus on my WIP. Which brings me to a whole new dilemma. This poor story has a couple of strikes against it. One, it’s a historical, and we all know the phrases agents love to throw out about those, and two, it takes place in the mid-18th century, not a particularly vogue time period in romance these days. Jo Beverly did it a few years ago with the Malloren books, but she already was well established before she published those.
But this is the era I enjoy writing about and I like my book. Mentally, I’ve prepared myself for the flood of rejections, but the writing is good and hopefully someone will give it a shot.
Melissa made some great points in her post yesterday. She talked about taking a chance on something new and different, that perhaps this is what the historical market needs. I hope so. I remember when I first started reading romances the historicals were all over the place with regards to place and era. The tide has to turn soon, doesn’t it?
