Q&A: Congratulations on signing with your agent! 🙂 It must be so nice to have all of your hard work validated!

Congratulations on signing with your agent! 🙂 It must be so nice to have all of your hard work validated!

Thank you. 🙂

Though if I’m completely honest, I still don’t really feel validated by it. I mean, it’s great, and I’m over the moon happy, and everything. 

But I don’t feel any more valid than I did before. I still don’t really have a clue what I’m doing. And I still have days where I’m terrified someone will find out I don’t have a clue what I’m doing, and call me out for being a fraud. 

I got the agent call while I was in the middle of revisions. Revisions that shouldn’t have been so hard, but for some reason were. And there times I really did not know if I could do them or not. I felt like my book was broken and I did not know how to fix it. If it could be fixed. If it should be fixed.

And in those times, I really wanted to be rejected. By everyone. I wanted them to tell me it wasn’t working and I should move on to something else. Because moving on to something else seemed so much easier than fixing what was broken. 

So much easier than admitting something was broken, and I did not know how to fix it. 

Then Jessica called, and she loved the story, even though it wasn’t perfect, even though it needed a lot of work. Loved it enough to want to represent it. And I as thrilled. 

And then I was terrified. Because if I couldn’t figure it out, if I failed this book, I wouldn’t just be disappointing myself. I would be disappointing the editor who requested it. The agent who believed in it enough to represent it. 

I really do not like letting other people down. 

It took a lot of self ass-kicking to get over that. Probably it will take even more next time.

So yes, it is a great thing, and I am very excited. 

But no, I don’t feel validated, really, like my hard work finally paid off. If anything, I feel like the hard work has just begun.