The first lesson I learned as a writer is I will never write the perfect story.

In fact, just when I think a story or book is as good as it can be, someone comes along and says, “Nope. It needs this…”

For instance, I finally received a response to one of my proposals that I had submitted a few months ago. It’s a rejection, but a positive one (yes, there is such a thing). Most of the time a rejection is either no response or a simple “Thanks, but no thanks.”

This rejection says in part: “The genre is potentially a good fit for our press, and many of your underlying concepts of worldbuilding are intriguing; however, we think that this story might benefit from a developmental edit to help balance out the various characters’ points of view and to regulate the balance of pacing between the characters’ internal processing and the action in the story. While we won’t be pursuing this manuscript any further at [this] time, we would welcome a resubmission after edits.”

So it’s a “sort of” rejection. I’m nonetheless now researching editors to see if they can help me with the issues above, and hopefully make my story even better to justify a resubmittal. There’s still no guarantee they’ll accept my manuscript, but it’s certainly a step in the right direction.

My not-so-secret hope is that any suggestions don’t require a complete rewrite, or I have to reimagine the entire story including the world, plot, and characters. I’m already working on a new novel, so diving into another one at the same time will be quite the challenge.

Good thing I’m still off social media…

Aside: In researching what graphic to use at the top, I typed in “work images.” Over 95% of the pictures were computer/office related. No construction, welding, farming, ranching, or other physical labors. I can think of many reasons why that is, including audience. After all, I’m on a computer, so it stands to reason looking for work images would be related to computers… Still, I hate to think the browser algorithm programmers don’t think that jobs where working on roads, buildings, etc., isn’t considered real work.

Now it’s time for me to go back to work…