Panic in the Query Room

To any aspiring authors out there—you know who you are.

You nursed your novel from the germ of an idea. Then came the outlining. And the further outlining. And the further-further outlining, because you wanted to want to start chapter one—but secretly you didn’t, and another outline was so much safer than a blank first page.

You held your finished book like it was your newborn. You told everyone you handed it to—alpha reader, beta reader, the copy editor, the man at the bus stop—that it was “probably terrible, honestly.” Maybe (if you’re anything like me) you said it preemptively, so that if the writing was shit, they’d go easy on you. Lower the bar and nobody can trip over it.

But to you? This is THE BEST BOOK EVER WRITTEN. Not figuratively. The finest arrangement of words in the history of the form.

So you query it. You receive your first rejection, accept it with enormous grace, and think: how dare they reject the best book ever written. Then the second arrives. And the third. And somewhere around the fourth you reach the writerly serenity prayer—“this doesn’t mean it’s not good, it just means it isn’t for them.” Though I’ll be honest: that pivot took a while to catch up with me. The mouth said it long before the ego believed it.

For my second novel, the mindset has changed completely. I 100% expect the rejection now. There are thousands upon thousands of writers out there better than I am, and being passed over this time simply won’t sting the way it did.

Here’s the fact of it. My 25-year journey let me self-publish two novels. It also left me with a deep, slightly chaotic bag of outlines and first drafts that I keep returning to—reworking them as my instincts sharpen, like a magpie with a folder full of shiny half-finished things.

Most people who’ve read both novels have enjoyed them. Not many leave a review, or even a rating (as far as I can tell), but that’s alright. It’s out there. It’s available. That counts for something.

And then—the panic.

While reviewing one of my recent submissions, I spotted two errors. I’d garbled a perfectly simple sentence—it reads, but not as cleanly as I’d like, the literary equivalent of a shirt buttoned one hole off. And I’d dropped an ‘s’, so a word that should have been plural sat there, smugly singular. I wanted perfection. I got a typo and a faint sweat.

But I’m human. I make mistakes. Agents see mistakes all the time, and depending on how catastrophic they are, they’ll probably overlook them. Probably. (It’s the “probably” that keeps you up at night.)

All of which is to say: yes, I’d love to be traditionally published. But my feet are firmly on the ground. I know the odds. I know it likely won’t happen—but at least I’ll be able to say I tried. And if only one person reads my next novel, I’ll call that a success.

After all, I’ve already convinced one person it’s the best book ever written.

Me.