Rejected, Again.

I awoke this morning to the typical shriek of my alarm clock, groped for my phone (naturally), and…yep, there it was, at long last. My rejection letter from Angry Robot Books. Something to the effect of “the writing was good, characters were good, but it just didn’t quite have that AR feel, and yes, it really is just that vague, but please feel free to query any future works with us,” blah, blah, blah. It took all my strength just to get out of bed.

I knew it was coming. When the editor posted on the main AR thread over at AW that anyone from Open Door Month who hadn’t heard back should email him, I knew it didn’t bode well for me. When he sent out mass emails saying we'd hear back in a few days, I figured that was pretty much it. I doubted I was going to get an email that read, “We loved it so much we completely forgot about it.” Yeah…no. But that didn’t keep my heart from plummeting when I read the actual rejection email.

I carefully avoided the subject with my husband when I got up, because I’m a grouch and a half anyway in the mornings and bursting into tears or somehow blaming it all on him was surely not going to help things. He still doesn’t know, and I’m sorry about that, David. I love you! So I got into my car, put “Someone Like You” on repeat, and damned to Hell every car I saw all the way to work.

I suck, you suck, everybody sucks but me, %$#&$ ^#$@*$ EVERYBODY!!!!

So I’m blogging about my pain and my (for the moment) utter conviction that I’m a hack and I’ll never write again, and trying to refrain from deleting everything I’ve ever written, including that biology paper I’ve been working on.

You see, real-life Becky is an even-keeled, dispassionate automaton, but virtual Becky has extreme emotional knee-jerk reactions all over the internet that she regrets ten minutes later. Real-life Becky sits very still and keeps her trap shut when she’s upset. Virtual Becky goes on rampages and killing sprees and makes bad decisions. So real-life Becky is trying very hard to keep her foul-mouthed and impulsive alter-ego under control until she calms down.

I don’t suck. I know that. Except, you know, I TOTALLY DO SUCK and I should stop submitting anything to anyone ever again. I can’t even get a short story published. I mean…I have, but not for months, and not for pay. But the version AR rejected was almost a year old, and it’s been through several betas and revisions since then, including some by the other Anxious Appliances, who are all literary geniuses. Heck, when I change a minor spelling error I look back in disgust on the previous version and hate myself for ever sending it out. I gave EoS to my coworker to read yesterday, as she is a fantasy reader. She put it on her Nook, opened it up, and didn’t move for twenty minutes. So it can’t be THAT bad, right? RIGHT?

WRONG! It SUCKS and you KNOW IT! It’s cliché and stupid and tropic and everybody hates it except non-writer people who don’t know any better. AAH! Give me that hard drive, I’m going to KILL IT IN THE FACE!!

Now I have to decide whether I want to rework EoS into a YA or submit it again as is. I don’t know yet, and as I mentioned before, virtual Becky makes very hasty and often very bad decisions when she's upset. So I’m going to give myself a couple of days to be sad and hate myself, and then I’ll do…I don’t know, something.

I wish I drank.