Titanic-Hating-Goo-Covered-Squid (or, Rejection)

You know how some people are gorgeous criers?  Their eyes glisten as they well up with tears.  Their already doe-like lashes seem to amplify with the moisture.  Their complexion becomes rose-like and dewey from whatever happens physiologically when we cry.  I had a friend in college like that.  Two of my kiddos are that way.

I'm not.

This is what happens when I cry:  My skin becomes blotchy and swollen (my husband likens it to how a food allergy looks on some people).  And it's not just a quick there and back again kind of blotchy.  It sticks around for awhile - at least twenty minutes after the waterworks have stopped.  And for whatever reason, when the tears begin for me, my nose runs.  Fiercely.  I'll go through a mega-box of tissues for one good cry.  When I cry, I become a blotchy, swollen, snotty mess.

I avoid crying, and things that will make me cry, like the plague.  Especially in public.  Oh my goodness, I'll never forget the humiliating moment when the lights came up after Titanic, and the people around us in the Nebraska movie theater were staring at me like I was some kind of squid who had dropped from the sky: trembling, gasping for breath, covered in goo.  Horrifying.

Segue.

Last night, Thomas and I went on a date.  The first in months.  It was a much-needed outing.  We've got a lot going on, and we needed some grown up time, big time.

As we were waiting on our food at this great new dive we found (Fizz in Wichita.  Seriously excellent food, people.  Go there.  Now.), my phone dinged.  New email.  From an agent I was waiting on an answer from with baited breath.  I really liked the looks of this agent, and my hopes were high.

Oh, man.  Rejection.

I'm getting better at this rejection thing.  Anybody who has queried a book will tell you, rejection is just part of it.  Nobody's book is going to be everybody's cuppa.  That's just the way it is.  And I'm cool with that. But this rejection caught me off guard.  It actually hurt.  Not because she was harsh or mean or anything like that.  Not at all.  It hurt because, one, I really really liked this agent, and two, because (oh, crap), she said something that caught my attention.

Actually, it'd be more accurate to say it caught my husband's attention.  Back to the date.  We're sitting across from each other in our booth.  I have just slipped my phone back into my purse.  My face is rapidly changing from it's freckled-ivory self into a swollen-blotchy monster.  My nose is immediately out of control, and I'm grasping blindly for napkins.  Thomas is watching this, wondering what the hell is going on with his wife.  I'm finally able to spit out the word, rejection.

He immediately gets it.  He doesn't have to ask which agent I mean.  He knows me so well; he knows who I've been waiting to hear from.  He asks to read the email.  I refuse.  (Did I mention that crying also makes me utterly irrational?)  He insists.  I cave and wait, sniffling, as he reads it.

When he's done, he asks this question:

What does she know after reading the first 50 pages of your book?

I answered the question, and he looked at me kindof funny, and said,

Myndi, sweetie, that's not your book.  Your book starts when...

and then he went on to give me a run-down of my book through his eyes.  The things he loves about it, the things that make him care about it, the things that make him want to read it.

And none of those things are in the first fifty pages.

We paid our check and left.  I cried some more as we walked and talked, now not nearly as upset by the rejection, but by the fact that I'd missed something.  Something BIG.  Something writers aren't supposed to miss.  Granted, I'm an untrained newbie, but whoa.  If I haven't enticed the reader to care about the big picture of the story within the first couple of chapters, I'm screwed.  And the scary thing was, I thought I had done that.  I mean, good grief.  I've read, re-read, read aloud, re-read aloud, and read again.  I've polished until you can't see some of the letters on my keyboard any more.  I've spent sleepless nights going over plot, developing characters, imagining in fine details.  How on earth did I miss something so huge?

Anyway, all this to say, I'm stopping querying immediately.  I'm going back to work.  I love this story; I love my characters; I love these books.  And, yeah, I could stick them on a shelf and say they were my first try, and just be proud of that.  But I don't want to.  I want to do this right.  I want to grow.  I want the pain of criticism and rejection to spur me on to do better things than I would have otherwise.  I want to be able to say I gave this story everything I had, that I didn't cut corners.  Even if, in the end, it never sees the light of day, I want to be able to look at it and know the real success in the endeavor can be found in the process - in the growing, the changing, the learning.

1+1+1=3 (Shocking, but true)

This is the story about how a little book I wrote turned into three.

Really, it's more the story about how I learned (it'd probably be more accurate to say began to learn) to digest constructive criticism.

The first words I put to paper in an effort to write a book were penned the summer of 2009.  I don't know when I decided to write, exactly.  I do remember being in the car with the hubs, saying to him, "I think I'm going to write a book."  I'm sure he wrote it off at the time as another one of my harebrained ideas that I was sure to outgrow.  I tend to have those.  Do the words worm farming mean anything to you?  Yeah, not proud of that one.

He may have written it off (justifiably so), but I didn't.  The idea in my brain just wouldn't shut up; it had to be let out.  My memories of writing that summer are a blur: I remember scribbling on a legal pad in my car at Sonic after grocery shopping.  Staying up until three in the morning, alternating between wine and coffee, writing.  Mumbling something incoherent to Thomas (on several occasions) when he'd ask what was for dinner.  I'd found a new addiction, and thankfully, my sweet family was very tolerant of it.  Seriously, I couldn't ask for a more supportive family.

I disappeared that summer, and by the time autumn rolled around, I had a finished (I thought) book in my hands.  (What I had a was a second draft.  And those of you who write know that a second draft is just a couple shades away from the pure junk that is a first draft.  But I didn't know that.  I was a total newbie, and in my mind, I'd finished a freaking book, people.  I was ready to go.)

So I decided to put it out for a little test run.  I asked a few friends to read it and give me their thoughts.  Some read it, some didn't.  The ones who did were incredibly supportive.  I mean, really supportive.  Way more supportive than what I think a second draft deserved.

But one tiny little suggestion ate at me like rust eats metal.  I can't even call it criticism, because it was so gently given.  The suggestion was that I rewrite the book (that was written from a first person perspective) in third person.

Rewrite the book from third person?  Are you kidding me?  Rewrite the whole darn thing??

I ran two miles that night.  This detail is significant because I haven't run two miles (or one mile, or a half-mile) since I was 19.  (I'm a shade older than that now.)  And I haven't run two miles since.  I was just bowled over by the suggestion.  Didn't this person know how much work I'd already put into it?  On that side of the looking glass, the few months that I'd spent writing seemed like an eternity (on this side, it's a laughable amount of time).  I think at the time I justified ignoring this person's suggestion by telling her and myself that I was going to write another book in the voice from another character in the story to fill in the parts she found dissatisfying.  Lame-o.

Anyway, I put the book away entirely for a few months.  It was the holidays, we were busy, and I didn't want to think about it.  Because in the back of my head, a little thought was nagging at me: Maybe it would be better from third person.

I fought that thought tooth and nail.  I did not want to rewrite the whole stinking book.  I didn't want to do it!  No!

And then, on a wintery day in 2010, I turned on the computer, and got to work.

Oh.  My.  Gosh.

My friend was right.  The book exploded (in a good way).  Things that were left unseen came to life, characters that were one dimensional grew in depth and understanding.  The plot thickened, relationships grew.  The two worlds I'd created - the fictional version of our own, and a brand new one - seemed to come alive.

And somehow, in that time, one book became three.  A little more than a year later, they're finished.  And I'm so proud of them - and proud of me.  Finishing this project has definitely been a defining time of personal growth for me.  Reaching a long-term goal has a way of shaping a person.  That stubborn I'm-sticking-with-it-no-matter-what attitude is something I've had to work for, to earn.  It doesn't come naturally to me.

And now I'm in a whole new process of waiting/persistence - the haunting chore of querying literary agents.  Will my stomach ever not be in knots when I go to check my email?  Will I ever be absolutely satisfied with my query letter to the point that sending it doesn't have me breaking out in sweat?  I don't know.  But I want to embrace this part of the journey, and let it take me where it may.