I've had 2 R & R over the course of my querying. The first involved a phone call where the agent was very excited by the writing and concept but had issues with the way I'd structured it. I agreed with most of it and went about completing a revision (which I now see was in haste--but it didn't seem hasty then, of course) And that agent never got back to me after the resubmit. Lesson learned. What lesson? 1. too fast. 2. You can't count on these people no matter how much love they seem to throw you. 3. You are always on your own.
I then continued to query with what I felt was a better book-- but still kept on getting rejections. Lots of requests and lots of rejections, mostly personal but nothing that really SAID anything I could put in my pipe and smoke. UNTIL I received a golden rejection from an agent who had been an editor. She spent a page telling me, showing me, exactly where I'd gone wrong and it made perfect sense to me. It had to do with narrative drive. And when I read what she had to say, it made all of the other rejections fall into place and I could see that they were all saying different things, but it all came down to the same thing.
So that is what I am working on now. I've pulled out of querying. I've even turned down subsequent requests, explaining I am revising.
As always, this is a learning process. You do what you need to do, what you have to do when you have to do it, and then you reevaluate. You move on.
I feel grateful to have a renewed sense of what I need to do. But I'm scared, also. This is some really hard sh**--writing a novel. I am continuously amazed at how hard it is, how close I get, and still how hard it is to get it right.
SB
