Rejection Blues

I'm not new to writing. I've been doing it since I was a young boy, battling boredom in small-town, USA. Along the lines, you'd think I would have gotten used to hearing from at least one person, that my stuff just wasn't good enough.

Today, I faced yet again, the most dreaded portion of a writer's existence: the rejection. After spending several months of neglecting my wife, abandoning housework and rejecting all of my usual time wasting pleasures to write a 115,000 word novel, I finally worked up the courage to shop it around to agents and publishers. In a previous post, I talked about all of the pitfalls that entails. A week ago, I finally got a nibble. A nice young woman, in a well established agency, asked for a few pages of my manuscript. Eagerly, I checked and double-checked my work and sent it off. I spent the last week fretting over the quality of my work while simultaneously daydreaming of how I would market my work and make tons of money off the sales. Then I got the reply. "It didn't grab me like I hoped it would...I'm sorry..." yada, yada, yada.

In a few short sentences, a woman who has never met me, who knows nothing about the amount of time spent writing, rewriting and writing some more, to make that piece of work the best it could be, just crushed my hopes. In less than thirty seconds, that woman sent me back to square one, only now questioning whether or not I should even try to be a writer.

I know she's only doing her job. As an agent, she receives hundreds of queries a year from people, just like me, who think they're going to be the next JK Rowling, or Jeffrey Deaver or [insert famous author here]. As each agent is quick to point out, 99.5% of all manuscripts they receive (solicited and otherwise) are rejected at some stage of the process. So, really, I shouldn't have been surprised and I shouldn't be upset. The fact that she requested my work in the first place means I beat out roughly 75% of those who've tried this year. Most of the others will be rejected shortly. But that's not good enough. It's not nearly good enough for me.

My entire life, the only thing that I could really hang my hat on; the only thing I've truly ever been good at, is writing. The process won't be fulfilling to me until/unless my story makes it to print. Which is why this rejection hurts so badly. If I can't do this....what can I do? If the one thing that I've done in my life that feels natural, normal and right, isn't something I'm really able to do....