The submissions roller coaster

Gaaaaahhhhh.

Ok, just had to get that off my chest. Let’s all move on.

I can’t move on! I know sending stuff off to agents and hearing back from them is all just a Thing, and not on the scale of Life Events the way Child #3 nearly drowning is, for example (swimming out of my depth in a baggy jumper and boots whilst heavily pregnant and trying to keep my 3 year old’s head above the water is definitely not on my Top Ten Fun Memories list).

But I’m still feeling things with all this submissions business. Take now. An agent just asked to see the first 100 pages of my manuscript. Total yay right? Only instead of yay, it’s gah (see above). Why? Because I don’t want to send her my writing, and then have her not like it!🤦🏽‍♀️😑

It’s more specific than fear of failure: the form submission meant she’s only read my cover letter so far, ie 0% of my actual book. And the thing that she said made her ask for pages, was a joke in my bio. Which, yes, is nice (small yay) but I don’t think that kind of dry humour features much in the actual novel, and another agency who requested a full (total yay moment for sure) ultimately rejected it for being too YA leaning for them. But this new agent requesting doesn’t do YA.

This led to mild deviousness in the submission to the latter agent. My protagonist is (was?) 16. But I didn’t mean to write a YA book, I guess it’s kind of in that crossover point as it’s YA compatible for sure, but as I said I wasn’t targeting YA, I was just writing the story that was in my head.

The mild deviousness comes in with my later form submission. Absorb and apply the rejection feedback to strengthen subsequent submissions, right? So, in my new sub I said my protagonist was 18.

Which is fine – I then edited the book to make her age and all (hopefully all, please let me not have missed any🙏🙏) references to her age and how long ago certain things happened make sense. In this version, she’s 18.

But WHO AM I KIDDING? If the vibe of the book is YA, having a 16yo or 18yo protagonist really isn’t going to shift the whole novel. It shifts what the blurb may imply, sure, but the book’s still essentially the same book. A protagonist, by (almost) any other age, will be as YA. (I’m so sorry Shakespeare)

So now I’m squirming, hence the gah. Here’s a lovely, shiny request for some of my book, and yet I feel it’s got there under false pretences, or at least under crazed delusions, and I don’t want to take the next step on what will probably be another road to rejection. I want to hide under my duvet.

I’ll send it, obviously. There’s a chance the first agency who felt it was too YA have a different YA boundary to this new agent. Or perhaps that this one will like it enough that she’ll be up for the bother of editing it to work better as XYZ. But it’s not full of the humour of my throwaway bio joke, so she probably won’t find much to gel in the actual writing.

And this brings me to the other, rather larger GAH of this whole process. Trying to see the text through agents’ eyes, I’m so uncertain. Is this scene vivid, engaging and cool, or tired, derivative and flat? I don’t know. I look at my own work, which I polished and had beta read and reread and revised and proofread until I really felt I couldn’t get it any better, and I wonder if it’s just pants. Or at least, “good”, when to go anywhere it would need to be outstanding.

So I’m submitting. I’ve had two full requests (yay), one who has yet to reject it, and now this partial request. My confidence that it’s something worthy of being read is fast waning, and yet having come this far I’ll keep giving it my best shot, because I’ve lost all sense of judgement, and maybe it might actually turn out to be good enough for someone else to take a chance on.🤷‍♀️🤪🫣