Good morning world. I thought I’d do an update since I haven’t done one in a while. There’s not really anything to update. I’m still getting rejections. I think I’m up to 25 now. It’s hard to stay positive when you get that email that says something like, “Thanks for giving me the opportunity to read THE GIFT OF DEATH but I feel it’s not the right fit for me.” I get that trying to find an agent is close to trying to find the person you want to marry and spend the rest of your life with…it’s that important. But after getting so many rejections, I start to question myself. Does my writing suck? Well, I did let five people read my novel and all of them loved it and couldn’t put it down…so it can’t suck that bad. Right?!?

Maybe it’s my query letter. I’ve revised that thing so many times that I’m sick of looking at it. I’ve even changed my novel drastically in hopes to make it more marketable. That seems to not have helped at all. So now I’m questioning if I should have changed it at all. This is all so frustrating!

It would be nice if the agents would give you a real reason as to why they are rejecting me. I get that they get hundreds of letters a day but for that one hopeful author, it doesn’t help us that they give us no reason. UGH! I’d much rather them tell me that my query letter or my sent sample pages suck than hearing “it’s not the right fit for me.”

I guess this is just the way all of this goes.

I’ve decided that I’m going to give it to the end of the month. If I still don’t have any bites, I’m going to work on dropping a shit ton of money to self publish. I have to pay for editing, a good book cover and marketing. I don’t know the first thing about marketing but I guess I could learn. We’ll see…

I also have an urge to write a new novel that is not a thriller. I want to write something that won’t scare the crap out of someone, but rather change someone’s life or the way they look at life or bring meaning to them. I want to write something that makes a difference. Don’t get me wrong, I love writing these thrillers because I’m able to write about stuff that I pull from the depths of my fucked up mind, but I want to be more than that…just a thought right now.

In other news, I did submit to my first writing contest. I had to write a short story (1,000 words or less) about the holidays or winter. I submitted it already but the deadline is not until December 31, 2019, so I have a while to wait. It’s not a big contest. It’s only open to members of the Maryland Writers’ Association. The first place winner gets a $75 gift card to Amazon, second place winner gets a $50 gift card and third place gets a $25 gift card. Nothing big but it’s a start for me since I’ve never entered a writing contest before. I let my fiance read what I wrote and he said if I didn’t submit it then he was going to. I’ll share it with everyone after the contest is over.

Thanks for reading and feel free to share my site to your friends. Evidently, having followers is important…see, I’m already starting to think about marketing myself!!!