{"id":640,"date":"2018-12-29T18:09:07","date_gmt":"2018-12-29T23:09:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/?p=640"},"modified":"2022-06-18T21:32:30","modified_gmt":"2022-06-19T01:32:30","slug":"2018-my-big-year-of-fail","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/2018-my-big-year-of-fail\/","title":{"rendered":"2018: My Big Fat Year of Womp-Womp and Fail"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Yeah, it’s been that kind of a year.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

OK, so. This is not a fun update to write.<\/p>\n

Compared to 2017, 2018 was a tough, painful year in terms of my writing and where I was hoping to be by now.<\/p>\n

Everyone tells you not to take this stuff personally, but give me a break. We all know better, right? You can tell yourself \u201cIt\u2019s not personal, it\u2019s just the business\u201d hundreds of times, but when you\u2019re staring at the latest rejection, those words are meaningless. You love your book, your characters, your story. But nobody else does, no matter how hard they try to let you down gently. (And let\u2019s be real\u2014some don\u2019t actually try all that hard.)<\/p>\n

I know that actually admitting this flies in the face of everything aspiring writers are told about how they\u2019re supposed to feel. We should be glad we\u2019re getting our stuff out there! Yay us! It\u2019s not personal\u2014we just need to keep trying!<\/p>\n

But the hell with it: I\u2019m sick and tired of trying to act like Yay Me. Forcing myself to push on, to keep querying and creating new works, knowing I\u2019m leaving myself open for more rejection, is one of the hardest things I\u2019ve had to do this year.<\/p>\n

As was probably obvious from my silence after the BoostMyBio entry, I didn\u2019t get into Pitch Wars 2018. I\u2019m not going to lie: That hurt. A lot. Now I knew it was always a possibility\u2014there were way more applicants and far fewer mentors this year\u2014but it still felt like a kick in the stomach when the YA mentor\/mentee list went up and my name wasn\u2019t there. Not only had I not landed an agent from the 2017 Pitch Wars showcase, I wasn\u2019t even good enough to score a return invite in 2018. Ouch.<\/p>\n

I tried my best to put on my game face, shake the hurt off, and keep moving, but I quickly followed up that non-triumph by also not getting into Author Mentor Match. Although I didn\u2019t want to wallow in it, the double rejection really shook me.<\/p>\n

I think I got spoiled by having an early run of luck with Brenda Drake\u2019s contests; my YA novel was chosen for Pitch Madness 2017 and my adult horror was picked for Pitch Wars 2017 (and then Query Kombat 2018), so it hit pretty hard when nobody wanted THE KEEPER OF THE KEY. I\u2019m taking the book back to the drawing board to see if I can get any insight on why it\u2019s being met with a massive round of \u201cNah\u201d so far. I know the book needs work, which was why I entered it into mentoring competitions in the first place. But I still think\u2014and have had verified by readers\u2014that the story\u2019s bones are solid.<\/p>\n

As for TIDEPOOL, that\u2019s been a rough, frustrating road too. The good news is I\u2019ve had several partial and full manuscript requests, plus one shortlisting when a well-regarded publisher was having an open submissions period. The bad news is that they all turned into rejections. Some were form letters and some were incredibly nice personal emails that explained how hard their decision was, but so far nobody wants to take TIDEPOOL on. And that hurts too.<\/p>\n

I love that book. It\u2019s the first thing I\u2019ve written that feels authentically mine, and I still have hope I\u2019m going to find a home for it somewhere. What little feedback I\u2019ve had from agents has been all over the map, contradictory and vague, with no consistent criticism that gives me any real sense of where the book might be running aground. They liked the characters but thought the concept was thin. Or they liked the concept but thought the characters were thin. The first chapters were too slow-moving. Or the first chapters were really interesting, but the book just didn\u2019t turn out to be their thing.<\/p>\n

Sigh.<\/p>\n

My short fiction didn\u2019t fare any better: lots of rejections, a couple of shortlistings that turned into rejections, and one entry for a contest that was canceled with no winner named.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m starting to remember why I gave up writing and submitting short fiction back in the early 90s. Why keep subjecting myself to this? The world\u2019s already horrible and depressing enough without me actively seeking out rejections that remind me over and over that I\u2019m never good enough.<\/p>\n

But every time I think about throwing in the towel, another agent who takes horror hangs out a shingle, or another magazine solicits submissions that sound like my work, and I realize I\u2019m not ready to surrender yet. And the thought has occurred that if I\u2019d stuck with my writing back in the early 90s instead of giving up, I might be a lot further along in my career by now. I don\u2019t want to quit for 20 more years and go back to querying my first novel when I\u2019m in my 70s. I already feel ancient enough at a newly-minted 50, and while lots of agents and writers insist that this isn\u2019t too old to be starting out, I wonder sometimes.<\/p>\n

On the plus side, and there actually was one:<\/p>\n

The exception to my Big Year of Fail was writing workshops. I submitted to the Borderlands Press Boot Camp and was pleasantly surprised when I was accepted. It\u2019s in Baltimore this coming January, and I\u2019m excited. I\u2019m also scared shitless. I\u2019ve never been to an honest-to-god intensive workshop like this one, led by writers I\u2019ve actually heard of.<\/p>\n

And once I get through that one, I\u2019ve got only a couple of months of downtime before the next one. I applied to Futurescapes after seeing the instructor list, and given the extremely high profile of those instructors, I figured they\u2019d be inundated with applicants and so my chances of making it in would be very poor. And so I was shocked to be accepted into that one too. Bill and I will be going to Utah in mid-April; he wants to explore the area while I hash over my fiction.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m hopeful that if I\u2019m still no closer to my dream of an agent and\/or a book deal, I will at least be able to say by the end of 2019 that I\u2019ve worked hard at these workshops and improved my craft. When you get right down to it, those are the only things that are truly under my control.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s to having more uplifting news to share in 2019.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0 OK, so. This is not a fun update to write. Compared to 2017, 2018 was a tough, painful year…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[22,21,5],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/640"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=640"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/640\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1666,"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/640\/revisions\/1666"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=640"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=640"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=640"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}