Never give up! Never surrender!

As a few of you may know, this past week has been extremely difficult for me as a writer. The pile of rejections for Mirror Image has been piling up and my dream agent rejected me. Even though he had wonderful things to say about it, it was too romance-y for him, which left me thinking, “But that’s what I do. I write romances.” For the YA market yes, but still romances.

So, then I’m like, “Okay, so if it’s too romance-y, where does that leave me.” And I started doubting myself. What if everyone thinks that? Is that why no one is reading past the query?

Then with the doubt came writer’s block. The most dreaded of all things a writer faces—besides rejection. No matter what I did, I couldn’t get my mind to focus on character development, dialogue, narrative, anything. Which, of course, made everything worse.

Then, I started to even doubt the one book, I’d been sure of, since Hey, it’s been offered 3 contracts from publishers. It can’t be bad, if three different publisher’s wanted it, can it? The answer is, of course not. I had almost 200 readers on the final chapter of Fallen, before I pulled it down. That’s nothing to scoff at, but when you are in the middle of a pity party for yourself, you can’t see reason.

But then things started clearing, as they usually do and my husband decided he’d had enough. He convinced me not to give up on writing. It made me too happy usually. And that just because agents couldn’t see how good it was, didn’t mean it wasn’t good.

Then I read a blog post the other day about rejection and writing and it talked about how as writers we’re too close to our work. We’re like the overproctive parent that doesn’t let their children do anything. And we have to learn to let go. To realize that not everyone is going to like everything and to look at our work as objectively as possible. Listen to what others are saying. If the majority like your work, then take it as a good sign. That if the majority saw the same thing, then it might be a good idea to change it.

So, I started really looking at my work as objectively as possible and realized it was good. Sure, it needs a bit of tweaking here and there, but overall this is exactly something that I would pick up in the store.

Then I went back and read the comments I received on WEBook and the other critiquing sites and they all said the same thing. It needs a few things here and there, but overall it’s a good read.

So, just because the agents didn’t see it, or at least the ones that have rejected me so far, doesn’t mean it isn’t good. It just means it wasn’t for them. And with over 900 agents out there now, someone is bound to want to represent it. I just have to find them.

So, for all you aspiring writers out there, I leave you with this, “Never give up! Never surrender!”