Audaces Fortuna Iuvat.

Fortune favors the bold.

Virgil was totally and completely wrong.  Fortune doesn’t just favor the bold, fortune, and the writing business, favors the unbelievably persistent.

The agent that I was dealing with for the past six months passed on my manuscript today, after revisions, after a lot of back and forth, and after holding exclusivity for the entire six month period.  Here’s what I know about this now:

1.  Don’t give exclusivity.  Almost immediately after agreeing to the exclusivity, several other agents expressed interest, and I felt like I was only hurting my chances at getting published, and had the agent not passed I would have felt very wonky about signing with her having not given the other interested agents at least a fair shake.

2.  I think it really is important to get an agent that gets your work.  This agent was awesome–we worked very productively together, a chemistry I would like to find again with another agent, but within my novel is a careful balance between a glitzy, glamorous world of fashion and brand names and the dark, upsetting element of sexual abuse.  She didn’t believe that balance could coexist, which is what the novel is predicated on, so we weren’t going to get much further in any event.

3.  I still have other agents that are hopefully still interested in looking at the novel, despite the intervening time, and I’ll send it to both of them at the same time and hopefully one of them will be interested in committing to it.

4.  Naturally my fear is that the floor will fall out and not one of these agents will be interested, and sadly, that really may happen.  I’ve known for a long time that it will be a hellishly long road to get published, but it seems that the whole deal is not about how bold I am, but about how persistent I will be.

And I will be persistent.  Hear that, world?  You’re not done with me yet.  All in all, it takes me about as long to shop a novel around the industry and virtually exhaust my options as it does to write a novel, so if, God forbid, Tarian skids into deadsville, then by that time I’ll be ready to try another go-round with Arianna.  I’m not giving up.

I’m over getting old
Maybe it’s not my weekend but it’s gonna be my year
And I’m so sick of watching while the minutes pass as I go nowhere
And this is my reaction to everything I fear
‘Cause I’ve been going crazy
I don’t want to waste another minute here

So take that, Virgil.

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