Rejection. Part 2.

Unfortunately, the “Rejection” posts are going to turn into a series. 

I received another agent rejection from one of the agents I pitched to at the conference. This leaves us with just one agent that I haven’t heard back from. 

This part doesn’t get easier. 

It still stings when I open an email and find the word “unfortunately” somewhere in one of the sentences. (Just like the opening of this post. See what I did there?)

Giving up is something I find myself contemplating for a brief moment when these rejection emails inevitably come my way. Keep in mind, these are just the ones I’ve started sharing with you all. I have a few dozen more in a folder in my email from my first couple rounds of querying. It would be so easy to never put in the work of researching, emailing, writing queries, etc., for another agent. To hang up my writer’s cap and call it a day. I tried, I failed, and it’s time to turn my creative energy elsewhere. 

But I have to remind myself that I did the hard part. I wrote a whole book. I have 87,000 words of a cohesive story that lived in my head, and now it exists on paper. 

Not to say that writing a book is the only hard part of the publishing process, but you definitely can’t do the rest of it without first having a book to try publishing.

But also, this sucks, and I don’t want to minimize that part of the journey. Rejection is not something I enjoy feeling. However, feelings pass, and after I blink away the sting of rejection, I find a new emotion in its place. 

Determination. 

That’s the emotion I need to hang on to if I want to succeed in this industry. 

Here is the email I received:

I appreciated her response more than the other agent’s. She told me exactly what it was that she found lacking for her own tastes, and I fully understand that. I am a little disappointed because of the agents I pitched to at the conference, she was the one I had the highest hopes for. 

Her response was kind and thoughtful, and I am grateful for that. Her feedback is something to take into consideration, and it will be interesting to see if I get that note more than once. Ultimately, it’s up to me to decide if I want to add more exposition into the first couple of chapters or not, but it’s a suggestion I will keep in mind.

However, in the spirit of fully embracing the rejection and turning it into a thing of humor, I am also including a blackout poetry version as well. Granted, her kind email was a little hard to make super negative, so I have a couple of versions. Which one do you like better?

Version 1:

Version 2:

As always, you are more than welcome to submit your own blackout poetry version of the rejection! It helps more than you know!