It came in at 12:42 a.m. via email:
Dear Donna,
Thank you for sharing your work. Unfortunately, I feel that in today's market, I cannot take on projects unless I feel strongly about them. I'm sorry to say that it didn't happen with this one. This of course is just my opinion and others may feel differently. I wish you the best of luck with all of your publishing endeavors.
So there it was, my first rejection. I felt those five sentences but it wasn't the crippling blow that I thought it might be, there was an odd sense of relief - I had gotten the first one out of the way. Yes, the agent passed on my manuscript but I was still standing. She didn't rip me to shreds, she actually wished me well.
When I started sending my manuscripts out to agents I wondered how I would react to a rejection. I'd heard Kathryn Stockett in an interview talking about her debut novel, The Help. She'd sent her manuscript to between 45 and 75 agents (after a while she stopped keeping track) before she found "the one." Now, her highly rejected manuscript has been on The New York Times Best Seller List for 102 weeks.
So when I got my first rejection, Stockett's conviction, determination and resilience is what I thought of. No time for self-pity, figure out which agent to send my manuscript. One down - more to go - so who's next.
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