Lighting the Pilot Light

It’s getting difficult these days to motivate myself to write.  Once I sit down, I have no problems.  Thank god for that hour per day set aside for lunch.  But if I eliminated that, I’d have trouble plunking down and getting started.  For one, too many distractions on the Internet.  But that’s every writer’s foil.  The harder part is that it seems I’m getting no feedback.

I’m not talking about critiques or helpful rejections.  I’m just talking about responses.  Seems like the places I send to are taking longer and longer to send back.  Months at a time.  Magazines typically fall outside their average and estimated response times.

I started sending queries for Merm-8 in January.  Now we’re halfway through the year, and I’ve only gotten six responses.  You can’t blanket send to agents, because that’s bad form.  So I e-mail my top picks one at a time.  Then a few at a time.

Gaps between responses are either 1-2 days (read: immediate) or 2-3 months.  That’s a long time, and I’ve got a long list of agents to query.  Compare that to when I finished the novel.  Compare that to when I started the novel.  Compare THAT to when I first got the incepting idea.  Way back before even my first child was born, who is now four.

I know writing and publishing is a slow process, but this is the most disheartening part.  This is the part they talk in writing advice books when you need to stay optimistic in light of rejections.

But I would be fine with rejections.  I just want responses.  I want throughput.  I need to see some results.  I know Merm-8 is a good book.  I know it’s publish-worthy.  And then I see books like Fifty Shades of Gray make it to the top of the charts with no editors and self-publishing…