What is incredibly frustrating about the process for querying our novel to agents or small publishers is that it's a pure numbers game. Yes, so is short story submissions, but if a 1,000 word story never gets picked up, it's mildly disappointing, but we're only losing $100 in sales, at the most, and for something that took less than a month to do.
But it took is over two years to write and edit our novel. We went through multiple mental criseses (including discovering our plurality). We invested a non-0 sum into it as well.
If this doesn't sell, we are losing out in $10,000 or more in income. That is a lot of money for us, and will make an excellent start to our saving to buy a home.
It is hard for bird and Glory to not compare themselves to people in our writing community who have gotten more attention from agents. bird, especially, has a "rival" from his days on Tumblr that he wants to be more successful than, for his own spiteful reasons.
This is a lot like our past attempts at getting a job. I was able to manage interviews to make ourselves be more attractive to hiring managers. I sought out jobs that would fit our skills.
But there isn't much I can do to increase our chances at getting an agent. The only thing that could possibly help us is do an additional revision and cut out 20,000 or more words to get it to a size more palatable to agents...but that's not something I can do. The writers will have to handle it, and they would not handle it well. They already cut 50,000 words and feel it's as slim as it could possibly get.
I know they are also "afraid" that they might "actually" be short story writers and they were never meant to write novels. And they only picked up that idea from a craft book they had started reading...but nothing else in it has been helpful. And this idea is actively harmful.
I will move it to the donation pile and make a note of it, in case this memory doesn't stick. Also, Izzabelle is near, and her thoughts are very loud and annoying, but we do need to talk to her about the vote. I will attempt that as well.
-Halara