Clearing Rejections
This week I met a delightful woman who is a fellow writer of the same vintage as I am – i.e., we both worked when writing still paid (for example: HuffPost expects writers to contribute for free ) and midlist authors weren’t being dropped by the Big Five publishers as they acquired smaller houses. We were reminiscing about back in the day--gaaah, that makes me feel old!--when we sent print queries via snail mail (don't forget your SASE!) to agents and waited weeks, sometimes months, for a reply. I was recounting the story of seeking an agent for Blood Exposure , the first of my novels. Organized (compulsive?) as I am, I diligently tracked every query with a spreadsheet and saved every response. I used to segregate the responses in categories – Request for Full MS, Request for Partial MS, Rejection, Handwritten (getting a handwritten comment was almost as good as getting a request for a partial), Rejection, Form Letter. Far and away, the thickest file was the latter. If n