Much like when I started writing the book, this doesn’t feel all that momentous.  It’s just another query, number 62 or something like that.  The only difference is that it’s a new book I’m hawking this time.  Well, that’s not entirely true; I do feel all the optimism I felt when I was first sending out queries for The Northerners, because Hubris has yet to feel the sting of rejection.  It’s nice to have a clean slate, and I’m actually feeling really confident about this one, but I’m definitely not done with disappointment yet.  I’m trying to be a professional writer, after all.  Disappointment will be my lifelong courtesan.

That sounds like a more morbid thought than it actually is.  I’m just being realistic.  If I didn’t think writing was worth all the rejections and letdowns, I wouldn’t be doing it.  In a good story, characters don’t earn their highs until they endure some brutal lows.  Sometimes real life is just the same.

The problem is, your well-meaning-but-busy acquaintances might actually need a little prodding, because otherwise they’ll simply forget to read your book.  Or at least that’s what the devil on my shoulder is saying.  I listened to him a bit too much with The Northerners, so this time around I’m trying to err on the side of patience.  As of now there are three people who have read Hubris, and four who have a copy they’ve yet to finish.  Feedback so far has been helpful (and mostly positive), but I don’t have a very strong sense yet of what I need to change.  This is making me a bit antsy.

If worse comes to worst, I can probably pull off a decent revision on my own, but it’s hard to trust my own opinion after a certain point.  Writing a novel is all about navigating self-doubt.  At this point in the process, those waters get particularly muddy.

The manuscript is now ready (I hope) for the scrutiny of my beta readers: my girlfriend, friends, and family.  We’ll see what they have to say.  I’m quite proud of the story; it’s a lot more ambitious than my first two novels, and I think the end result is more accessible and compelling.  But I’m way too close to the text now.  I need a few outside perspectives before I can do any more work on it.

So, now I can relax and spend the next few months on my other projects, or just on reading, watching movies and playing video games.  I feel like I’m on vacation.

In related news, I got a rejection letter from the agent who was interested in The Northerners. But!  This was a good rejection, because he called it a “near miss” and said he liked my writing, but just wasn’t interested in this particular story.  He encouraged me to send him my next novel, and I will.

So The Northerners is not likely to get published anytime soon, but all that querying was still worth it. I went from having no contacts or prospects to having two agents who explicitly asked me to send them my next book.  If my beta readers really like it, including my writing-inclined acquaintances who I can count on to be demanding*, I might be querying again as soon as this summer.  We shall see.

* Even if you have demanding friends, your best bet for unbiased criticism is to join a writing group.  One of these days I’m going to follow that advice.

But I have to say, I’m still pretty happy with my book. Yes, it needs work (often not in the places I expected), but there’s some real promise here. I really look forward to showing it to people. In other words, the last six months were not a complete waste of time, and that’s all I ask for at this point.

Thanks to this agent, I’ve learned something new: some agents actually do reply positively via mail.  I’ve heard some authors advise you to not bother including a self-addressed stamped envelope with your query; it’s a sign of self-respect, they say, and if the agent is really interested they’ll call you or email you, since they only use the SASE for rejections.  Well, here’s a nice counter-example. Now this advice is not just questionable, but demonstrably wrong.

I was never really convinced by the no-SASE argument.  Even if the agent only wants the SASE for rejections, why would you want to immediately antagonize them?  When you’re just another unsolicited query in a big slush pile, you’ve got enough going against you as it is.  There’s nothing wrong with being professional and giving the agent what they asked for.

Anyway, we’ll see where this leads.  This has renewed my faith in the querying process if nothing else.  I’ll keep my fingers crossed, but meanwhile I’ve got Hubris to read and revise.  Let’s hope it’s worth shopping around.

This is the point, for me, when writing begins to feel like mild insanity. The story starts to follow me everywhere and distracts me when I’m trying to have conversations. I wake up from convoluted dreams starring my characters and plot points (once, when I was writing my first novel, I swear I had a dream in text. No joke) and I have trouble falling back asleep afterward. I catch myself mouthing lines of dialog on the train.

Maybe I write fast because I’m so eager to return to my normal thought patterns. Or maybe it’s writing fast that makes me crazy in the first place. Either way, I don’t actually mind this period so much. Writing a novel is such a drawn-out and often boring process that it’s nice to get an exciting week out of it at the end.

Three days left, maybe even two if I’m quick. Stay tuned.