It’s been over a year since the first book of my series was finished. It’s been through rewrites, edits, massive cuts, and additions. It’s been cursed, praised, cried over, forsaken. And that’s just by me. Others have read it. Several have rejected it. At the moment, three full manuscript requests are processing and many queries are circulating.
The most pervasive quality of the writing life is waiting, which requires patience of anyone attempting it.
When I say I can be patient, it’s a bit like saying I can be emotionally stable. It’s true, but not necessarily my strongest asset.
Waiting for feedback is a test of mental fortitude. Common advice includes submitting short stories and poems for publication (although that also involves long waits) because there are likely to be results in an acceptable timeframe. Not necessarily pleasing results, but proof that someone exists in the void where all that hard work has disappeared.
In the beginning, reactions (or lack of reactions) caused me to view my work differently. Rejections made me wonder if I had missed something important. Maybe it was horrible. Maybe the form rejection letters were reserved for writers so untalented, anything more specific would be cruel. Acceptances of shorter works brought back the spark of belief that caused me to commit in the first place.
Over time, the skin thickened. The strange and illogical parade of acceptances and rejections shed light on one truth: acceptance of any work in the creative field is truly subjective.
I’ve said all of that to say this–I still love my novels. I’ve been rereading them this week, mostly because I was afraid to. I’m positive they are not perfect. Even after so many edits and rewrites, I find passages that could have been different. Maybe the difference would have been an improvement. Maybe not. Some chapters I don’t remember writing and I’m impressed that they managed to make the journey from my brain to the keyboard (mostly because writing, for me, involves a lot of sitting and staring at a screen).
Is this satisfaction? I believe it is.
