Still Querying, but Tiring Fast.

One of my dearest followers commented that I am always so uplifting with my blog, so very optimistic about my querying process, and I feel like a sham today because I have to admit that it's all smoke and mirrors.

The fact is that I'm a bit tired of this whole query business. I received another rejection today - very generous, very enthusiastic, but none-the-less a rejection. Even the best, most popular, writers must get jaded with the feedback they get at times, so it stands to reason that an unknown, unpublished writer would get saddened by it. I love to write, but it would be oh-so-sweet to be writing for others.

I'm tired of being told that I'm a very good writer, but that my books are too quiet, too instrospective, and not marketable in today's tough, thrill-seeking culture.  I don't write for that readership. Can it be that the very people who might enjoy my books only use their local libraries and have little influence over book sales? Am I writing for a similarly quiet and introspective group who wouldn't know a Kindle if one jumped up and bit them on the nose? Is there such a group? Am I, to put it bluntly, writing only for a phantom audience, perhaps only for myself?

But that was always enough, wasn't it, once upon a time? The pleasure of the words, the poetry, the cleverness we saw - we did it for ourselves, didn't we, as we toiled into the night? I used to show my mother when I was very small, and that was enough, and, much later, my most trusted friends or family members. At what point did it become something we just had to share with the world? When did it become an ego trip? What did we read by one of our favorite, well-published writers that triggered us to think, "I have something new to say about this, and folks will want to read it."?

So, today, I am feeling like Martin Amis's protagonist, Richard Tull, in The Information.  I am despondent, childishly resentful, totally shallow and weepily exhausted by my thankless querying adventure.

Of course, I'm very tired from all of this moving business. Still packing - not all at once, you understand, but as the mood takes me - but there's a lot of mental processing going on about it all the time, and I'm not sleeping well. There is stress, despite my cat-entertaining Hatha Yoga asanas.

I still have queries for two books out there, by the way.  All is not lost. Only my optimism, it seems, at least for the time being.

Like Fagin in Oliver!,  "I am reviewing the situation."  I'm quite good at that.