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.
