(What is RSS?)This has been a goal of mine since I began writing twenty years ago. I didn’t actually get serious about my writing career until about eight years ago, though.
Fortunately, I have a book with an agent right now who is reviewing it. So I’m keeping my fingers crossed!
So on valentines day, that was tuesday, I guess, an agent from Curtis Brown, which is a big and all-powerful house in NY, called me on the phone. I had only sent him fifty pages, but he was the most excited and enthusiastic of the agents I have talked to yet. (I say that like I chat with them every day. Not true. I have spoken in person with one other, who I had an ongoing thing for six months with, which ended in November. This other guy was enthusiastic at the beggining, and then for whatever reason the enthusiasm waned and the relationship died slowly. Dan. He never had this new guy’s enthusiasm though. I’ve been having sometimes abreviated email dialogues with several agents for the last month or so.) With Dan I was always so meek, which I often am in other facets of my life as well. It’s not my true nature, and I decided that I would approach the process with more vim this time around. I have, I’ve been a complete bulldog, I’ve got five agents reading the entire manuscript right now, and each of them knows the other four are reading it, and I have been playing them off of eachoter, basically letting them know that the first one who finishes reading, wants to proceed further, and convinces me they can sell the book, is the one I will sign with. This has all developed in the last week, so I feel like I should probably hear something this week or next. These five agents have all basically taken the bait, as I have been baiting them every step of the way. So I feel like the hard part may be over. Something shifted last week, where it occured to me that I was no longer waiting for a rejection, but waiting for that elusive acceptance. Feels like the process is embracing me. Makes sense right? This is the only thing I have really wanted and really worked for for the last eight years.
Sent all or parts of my book out to three more agents today (the revised version of my book. I managed to work my way through it one more time the past couple weeks and cut out something like 20,000 words). I think I’m getting a little better at the process. Now that I know I’m probably not going to end up in a gutter somewhere if I don’t publish this thing, I am able to relax a little bit. I don’t think I’m afraid of rejection to the point where I can’t allow myself to be daring. I’ll get one of them to sign me. Just have to be myself, anxiety-ridden egomaniac asshole that I (sometimes) am.
John Grisham’s literary agent is reading my book. Probably one of the most powerful agents in new york, if not the most powerful. I read somewhere that he takes on a couple new writers a year, he renews himself by the art of discovery. I am hopeful, but then again not.
