Well, I got my first rejection letter yesterday. Or, e-mail, I should say.
And then I got my period.
Awesome.
Actually, it wasn't that bad. I mean, I wasn't curled up on the floor, sobbing and wailing, "Why? Why, God?" or anything.
I actually looked at myself in the mirror and grinned, because, by god, I did it. I started, and now I've got the standard rejection letter to prove it. I'm in the club, a club that has had many an august member.
I did find myself having a mini crisis of purpose, though this was triggered not so much by the rejection letter, as by the subsequent two or three hours of Internet researching of query letters, literary agents, and the publishing industry in general.
When I started writing, I remember saying something on my blog about how I should be picking a target audience and then write for that audience, but that I was not doing that.
Well, now I'm beginning to see how much more difficult it will be because of that choice. Publishing is a business with a shrinking market base. They must publish works that will make them a profit margin.
My writing fits nowhere. It would be a complete gamble for someone to pick up my work. My first novel is a romantic fantasy. It's not urban fantasy, steampunk, high fantasy, erotic fantasy or dark fantasy. It's just romantic fantasy. I don't see too many agents wanting submissions of that type of work.
My current novel is even more difficult to typecast. What is it? Is it high fantasy, with its world building, epic journey and light vs. dark themes? Not really. It's dark, but it's not a horror story. It explores human psychology, but it's not a psychological thriller. It uses a great deal of humor, but it is not a comic fantasy. It describes how love changes and enriches our lives, but it is not romantic love.
There's no question I want to be published. In terms of Torii, I want it to speak to a specific audience; others who have been down the same healing journey that I have. In terms of Ceallach, I just want to entertain.
In general, I want the validation. I want to know that my writing is that good. I don't think this desire is either egotistical or insecure of me. It's just the natural progression of being a writer- after a while, you want to test your writing, even if its just a toe in the water.
However, as much as I genuinely want to be published, I do not wish to write with that as my only goal. I don't want to craft an entire story just because I think that story is the one that will sell. That just doesn't seem worth doing, to me.
And that is what all the advice boils down to: write for the industry. Craft your story to sell, craft your query to sell your story, craft a platform and hire an agent to sell yourself.
I've been blogging about this for a while now. It's because I'm really wrestling with it. On the one hand, I see how that advice is practical and how it would work, eventually. And doesn't being a professional writer mean following some, if not all, of that advice?
I don't know yet. I suspect that a large part of this journey will be wrestling with those questions, as I gather experience and perspective.
Here's what I do know. I won't write something that isn't authentic to myself. If it never sells, it never sells. However, I would like to continue learning how best to present my writing, and I would like my writing itself, my creative process, to continue to grow and deepen.
To that end, I am rewriting my query letter- I've got a better idea of how to open it and I've since learned that I don't need the formal structure that I gave it.
Also, I'm going to restructure the beginning of Ceallach. I'm going to absorb the prologue into the main body of the story, so that it opens with a hook, instead of descriptive narrative. It will still be exactly the same language, nothing will be cut. It will be simply rearranged to that it grabs a person (or agent) right off the bat.
Then, as I was looking up how long it took Madeleine L'Engle to be published (I vaguely remember that she wasn't published until she was in her forties), I came across this quote:
“The vocation of the story teller is not to worry about the expectations of the world, but to bear the pain of redemption.” - Madeleine L’Engle
Weighty, but fascinating. And oddly to the point, when it comes to Torii.
