Same As The Old Year

There'll be no mail delivery today, as the nation mourns a dead President. I'll leave it to history to debate the merits of the man.

The rejection season will therefore start a day later, and I expect to find that many more SASEs in the old mailbox. The agents were not so much out of their offices as they were hunkered down, catching up on the reading and such. With about fifteen queries still out there, waiting for answers, I could possibly have a box full of envelopes by this afternoon.

E-mail, however, is still working and that's brought the first rejection of 2007, and a painful one it is at that. Stephen Barbara of the Donald Maass agency responded to an e-mail query sent two weeks ago. Kudos for sending a response, when a no serves as a rejection. In this case, I almost wish there had been no response.

"...but the writing sample for TITLE didn't quite grab me so I am going to pass on pursuing..."

Highly informative and rather frightening. If he got past the query and read the pages, and was not grabbed, then there's a problem with the writing. The problem is compounded by the fact that I don't know what to fix. Did I slip up and put too much back story in at the beginning? Is it too slow, too dull, not lively enough? And it's all subjective anyway, so what he found not grabbing might appeal to someone else.

So it begins, the new year starts up with more of the same as last year. The same questions, the same concerns, the same fears. With everything so unchanging, I might as well just keep writing and querying. Now, to get the response from the literary agents to shift slightly in my favor...