So I had a wonderful sight to greet me when I woke up this morning. (/ sarcasm). A rejection letter from the second literary agency that wanted the sample of my book.
Dear Catherine,
Thank you so much for the opportunity to give your work a preliminary review. Though intrigued by some aspects of your sample book, we were not sufficiently enthusiastic to consider representation.
I really liked the voice in the sample; Kate's chatty and familiar yet fluid tone was perfect for this type of book. However, I didn't find myself connecting with the characters as much as I'd hoped.
All our decisions are based on a frank assessment of the literary and film marketplace. The fact that your story doesn’t fit our criteria for representation does not mean it couldn’t find a home elsewhere. I urge you to submit your project to other agencies and management companies; perhaps another representative will have a different opinion.
I do thank you for sending your work our way, and I wish you the best of luck with this and all your writing.
Kind Regards,
I am unsure of what to do after a letter like that. Should I go back and revise, making my characters more approachable and relateable? Is this because Irenie is Norwegian? You don't meet many Norwegians on a day-to-day basis. Should I have made her Puerto Rican or something? Is it because Kate and Irenie's friend Colby is gay, and that's controversial? (He's the most Disneyfied gay dude ever, though. How offensive can he be?)
It's probably because Kate herself is an off-the-wall character. She's weird. I admit it. She's a lot like me, in that she has a rich inner life. Some people think it's strange that when I'm bored in the car I imagine John Adams sitting in the backseat, aghast at things like airplanes and traffic lights. I picture myself explaining to him what they are. Weird. Kate's like that, too.
So I should probably change her. But I love her. I don't want to change her--I CAN'T. If I changed her, she wouldn't be her.
To top it all off, I have the shittiest, strangest cold. I never get sick, and now it's like all the colds I should have gotten in the past three years have descended on me at once, in one giant amalgamation of a cold. My throat hurts. My nose is stopped up. I'm exhausted all the time. My food tastes bad to me, except for the few things I want, which I always want when I can't get them (IE, it's hard to get sushi at 1 AM, even in the city). I hate being sick; I am the world's worst patient.
I'm trying really hard to focus on the nice things in the letter, but I'm having a difficult time doing it. Y'all know it's a form letter. "I urge you to submit it someplace else" basically means "We don't want this, but we'll feel bad if you blow your brains out because we said it sucks."
Basically, this is me today:
Woe is me.
A.) Although we often write things with how it will look on the big screen in mind, I'm rather disgusted that it was rejected because it didn't meet a frank assessment of the literary and film marketplace. Well, DAMN! It's not a vampire or wizard book! Whatever happened to books about normal people?
ReplyDeleteB.) DO NOT change a thing just to sell out and make it more what people are looking for these days. Good work is timeless. I'll never have anything published, but I'm one of those people who really hates to see people change a lot of their vision just to sell it. It is assumed that the book-buying public is only looking for certain types of stories, but where's the originality in that? How droll would Scarlett O'Hara have been had she been a typical Mary Sue? Would we have loved Anne so much if she had grown up in Bolingbroke, Nova Scotia with parents Walter and Bertha and had raven black hair?
C.) Get well soon. It sounds a lot like my seasonal visitor, a sinus infection. Take care of yourself.
I didn't think about this being a casualty of the vampire craze. I guess I was too stuck on the "we don't want it" to notice that line. This makes me feel slightly better--this too will pass. I've just got to stick with it.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the healthy dose of truth and encouragement. I feel better (emotionally, hack hack) now.
I'm actually a little jealous of the letter - the fact that they actually wrote something that showed they READ it. The last rejection letter I got (from the agent who had requested the sample, and then suggested the change from 1st person to 3rd), simply said: "Thanks, but pass." Literally. She wrote that on my summary. No letter or anything.
ReplyDeleteI'm with Adrienne - DON'T change Kate. This is only your second agent, you have a lot more options to look into before changing her. Besides, if she's as off-beat as you describe, she'd probably fight you tooth and nail if you tried to alter her personality, and that would just be exhausting. Personally, I love the idea of explaining modern DC to John Adams in your backseat. Heck, I prepare half my meals while pretending I'm on a cooking show!
Feel better. SOON. Drink tea and OJ and get yourself some lotion tissues, and rest and read until that raincloud has gone away!
Is this available for me to read somewhere?
ReplyDeleteElouise: Grrr to agents who do that! I've gotten several of those--one actually even said "Dear _______" instead of "Dear Catherine!" It made me a little glad that they didn't get my book, because they were so unprof...oh, who am I kidding? I'd give it to them if they wanted it.
ReplyDeleteAdrienne: you were right, I had a sinus infection. I should have listened to you! Instead, I let it go on for another week and finally got so ill I needed to go to urgent care, and am now on TWO antibiotics! I need to add that to the Job post.
Kate isn't online yet. Maybe one day, when I have finished licking my wounds. I'm sort of toying with the idea of self-publishing on Amazon. Maybe that will happen someday, and if not, maybe I'll put it on fiction press.