Wednesday, August 19, 2009

Always a day late...

I’ve been a lot quiet over here lately, because of all the chaos. Sometimes I write my way through chaos, and sometimes I have to hunker down and wait for the twister to blow over.

The past two weeks have been the latter. Hiding in the basement, covering my head and neck, away from all windows.

I might have mentioned that I got two requests out of my trip to the RWA national convention—1 from an editor, 1 from an agent. I'm fairly certain that the agent request was standard issue, as she only requested a partial. The editor, on the other hand, seemed fairly interested. It helped that I was pitching something that met their standards to a tee.

I submitted partials to both (I had forgotten to check whether the editor wanted the full) on July 26th, and proceeded to check my email daily thereafter. Not just any email--this particular address had only been used to send two messages ever, so there would be nothing there except for a reply to my submissions. It was silly and driving me nuts, so I gave it a rest for almost a week.

Of course, the editor had emailed me, a WEEK earlier, requesting the full. "As soon as possible". That sent me into full-fledged panic mode and I spent a frantic week (probably 20 hours or so, working around the day job and evening classes and oh, yeah, kids) polishing the manuscript and emailed it last Friday, August 14th.

I check my email again today (the 19th), and find a nice note, dated yesterday, from the editor thanking me for the submission. But she's leaving the company, effective yesterday. She's passing my manuscript on to colleagues.

I didn't even read the message early enough for a polite, "Thanks and good luck" kind of reply. And my hopes, which were artificially inflated by that "asap" wording, have just hit the slush pile.

I can hope that this is really the eye of the storm, but I'm thinking that I'm back to the calm.

Oh well. I have some contest entries to polish, and some Aliens to blast into space. And someday, that storm will be back.

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