Almost the End of June

This cold (or colds, perhaps) has been kicking my ass all month. I came down with it at the beginning of June, just after finishing the first draft of my (second) novel. It's been a bear. I feel puny for a while, then I improve...and then I feel puny again. Lather, rinse, repeat. I keep thinking I've finally kicked it for good, only to find myself sitting on the sofa with no energy and a gummy brain incapable of doing much of anything creative. I'll rally and get energetic, only to then find sitting through a movie (we say "Knight and Day on Saturday) exhausting, and sit around like a vegetable all evening. It's annoying as hell.

My lovely and talented wife has caught it (from me, I fear) too. She spent three days home from work (plus the weekend in between), fighting it. And we're commiserating with one another. Yup, yup--I know exactly how you feel. Exhaustion. Foggy brain. Clogged sinuses or sinus drainage and a persistent, annoying cough. The symptoms vary, and they come and go, but they won't go AWAY.
It's gotta pass sooner or later, right?

Anyhow.

I've got about 100 pages left to edit on the novel, then I'll be ready to let my lovely and talented First Reader take a look. Assuming she finds no serious faults with it, I'll send it out. I've already picked out five publishers (five specific editors, really) to send it to. This via Publisher's Marketplace (publishersmarketplace.com), where they send out daily emails about who bought what novel from whom (and via what agent/agency), and maintain a database available to paying users like me, so I can for instance see who has bought space-faring science fiction novels in the last year or so, and then see what other novels that editor/imprint has bought lately.

I'd hoped to get several short stories written this month while my novel lay fallow for a while. I only managed to get one done. I sent it out, and got a rejection on it (both via snailmail at that) from the editor in about ten days. In line with the ancient art of Rejectomancy, I choose to take that as a good sign. Some of my earlier submissions took considerably longer to come back (with form rejections). This one was read (and rejected, admittedly) much faster. I like to think it's because she recognizes my name by now and is waiting for a story she's willing to buy. I haven't written it yet, but I will.

As for the novel--it's going about the way my rational self expected, despite the doomsaying of my emotional self. I put it aside, glad to be done with it at last, and wondering if it was really as awful as I feared. Two weeks later, as I'm going through it to clean it up a bit, and expand or trim scenes here and there for clarity, I find--just as I found with my first novel--that it's not as bad as I feared. It holds up better than I thought it would--quite well, in fact.

That's getting to be a familiar pattern, and one I suspect will always be the case. But I know that, and know that eventual success (publication, money, groupies--all that stuff) requires only that I Trust My Process. Ignore the nagging voice of doubt and just keep writing. I've finished two novels by doing just that. And I'll finish more the same way.

Speaking of which, I need to figure out what my next novel is going to be. July is almost here--and is the start of the third quarter of 2010. If I'm going to write two more novels this year, I'm gonna need to start the third-quarter novel pretty soon. Which kinda gets my heart racing as my ego starts running in circles, screaming and shouting. "Oh god! What am I gonna write now? What if I can't come up with an idea? What if it sucks!? What if I never have a good idea for a novel again? Oh god!"

Trust. The. Process. Easy to say, harder to do. But it works. I have two novels written now to prove it, when before I wrote my first one last November, I didn't really think I could do. But I have. And I will again.

Stories in Circulation: 11
Rejections: 41
Stories Accepted: SEVEN
Stories to Resubmit: 2

Novel Queries: 1 Novel, 4 queries out
Novel Rejections: 6