Results of Ruminations

I've been sitting on completed manuscripts for too long now, and they're starting to burn in me a little. I feel like I need to step up my agent query list, but every time I send out and get rejected, I feel burned and disheartened. It's been a long while since I tried to query (months at the minimum) and I need to put my work out more fully. Every time I'm rejected, though, I figure that it's because I haven't put enough polish/work on my book. That is true, though that may not be the reason I didn't hook an agent before. No, I think that there are a lot of factors that are connected to my failure to get anything accomplished on the publishing front and I can't control most of them. Those that I can, however, mostly involve the amount of work I can do in my revisions. But I keep landing on my perennial problem: I don't like doing revisions. I don't like revisiting stories I've told, I'm tired of the characters, plot, and words. I wish...

Now that I'm over half-way through my edits--and, with Fall Break on the horizon, I'm hopeful to make additional strides--I need to spend time researching who would be interested in my "spaceships meet dragons" story. I wrote (under the tag of "story journal") about my lengthy process writing and revising Writ in Blood . I also talked about some of the failures of that book in terms of finding representation. I have continued writing in the face of that defeat, now well into my eighth book since I graduated high school (which isn't that many, when I put it that way). The one I'm working on now, however, was my sixth novel. That means I'm close to publishing, or halfway there, depending on whose success story you're reading. As I've put more time into my craft, trying to hone my feeble skills, I go through flashes of excitement and possibility, then crashes of dismay and defeat. It comes in part because I can't get consistent momen...