Where The Rubber Meets The Road

It’s quarter to four in the morning, and my body has tipped over the insomnia waterfall, ready to plunge into the weird, waking world of the sleep deprived.

Noelle took the brunt of the day shift, so it was left to me to see Gabe off to sleep. After the meningitis scare, we are extra twitchy about his every ache and sniffle. We try not to let it show. But when I ran out to collect Gabe from school Wednesday afternoon, his stomach was painful and sour, and his head ached. This is how it began last time, I thought.

The vomiting started later. I took as much of the puke patrol as I could; I have the stronger stomach. A low-grade fever rose by the hour. It was a lot like last time. It was also a lot different. There was much to be optimistic about.

Nevertheless, I stood my post, unable and unwilling to relax until something – good or bad – happened. Around two AM, Gabe woke to have some water. His temperature was 99.1. Two degrees lower with no medication. I put him back in bed and dragged my sorry ass back to the adult’s bedroom.

Noelle is turning from time to time, making the kinds of noises you make when you’re in dreamland. I sit beside her, writing this.

I wait for the sandman to come and claim me.
I am ready, Morpheus.

Got another form rejection letter today.

It’s a good thing I’m a comic; rejection is like my oldest friend. In comedy, rejection is visceral and immediate. It come in the form of silence, or uncomfortable huh-huh-ing, or a gasp (usually when your over-the-top joke gets taken a little too seriously – one of the pitfalls of being so good at the deadpan). Sometimes, you’ll get that sweet, stinging slap of a boo. That always makes me smile. Not to sound too full of myself, but the ‘boo’ doesn’t happen to me very often. When I get one, it’s almost like a rare kind of applause break; I know I’ve really earned the audience’s reaction.

In writing, rejection is the distant and uninformative judgment of people you’ll never meet. Not that they are to be counted cold for the form rejection; at least they replied. The wall-of-silence rejection is the one that gets under your skin. Even then, I don’t blame the agents. They don’t mean it personally; they’re not even saying your work isn’t any good. It’s just not right for that particular agent.

However, the unfortunate truth is that the wall-of-silence and form rejections lack one thing the visceral, immediate reaction of a comedy crowd does not: Something to learn from. The worst part is, there’s no way around it. Literary Agents are deluged with submissions on a daily basis. They’d starve trying to explain why they rejected everyone’s work. So, they don’t. And the writer is forced to shrug and move on.

Mind you, if you’ve gone through a hundred queries and never received so much as a nibble, perhaps you might want to reconsider what you’re doing. Of course, there’s no way – easy or otherwise – to pinpoint the specific problem. Oh, you can pore through a slew of blogs and a near-infinite number of essays on the topic(s) of manuscript submission/querying, but once you eliminate the ten to twenty common sense, glaring errors, it’s a complete guessing game.

I haven’t reached the oh-crap-I-must-be-doing-something-seriously-wrong point. I haven’t submitted enough. For now, I’m in shrug-and-move-on mode. Which, at this point, is defined as “burying myself in a new project until I get picked up, or until everyone on my current list rejects me, whereupon I go to my next-in-line crop of agencies, and repeat the process”.
Meanwhile, NoMeansNo’s Tired Of Waiting is on infinite loop in the iPod™ of my mind.

Looking forward to the next, fleeting glimmer of hope known as the unopened query response letter/email.