I have been insanely busy lately, which explains my posting habits over the past few weeks. On top of work suddenly picking up at work (and at home), I’ve had a sudden desire to work on Infinity’s Heir, supplanting any effort on the blog for the past week. That being said, I’ve managed to get about two chapters done and another will be forthcoming soon (I can feel it rattling around in my brain, now).

But that’s not what this post is really about.

Today, I want to talk about waiting.

I already touched on waiting in my post titled Impatience. That post, however, was made only five days after a full manuscript request.

It’s funny how things can change as time passes. Initially, I was agitated about having to wait for a response from the agents. I couldn’t handle not knowing whether they had received the manuscript or whether they were reading it. Things got even worse a day or two after that post when one of the agents who had my manuscript tweeted a #MSWL about wanting to read the exact kind of story that I had just sent.

Since then, there has been another development.

Exactly one week after submitting my full manuscript to the first agent, I received a request from another agent for the same. The excitement I felt the first time such a request was mirrored (almost exactly) and I immediately sent the manuscript off.

That was about 12 days ago.

I’ve been waiting to hear something since then – and from two agents instead of one. A total of 17 days, so far.

There comes a point, when waiting for a response changes from something you spend every moment thinking about, to something that you willfully push to the back of your mind. The prospect of an agent liking your work and extending an offer of representation is still there – along with the excitement – but becomes wholly overshadowed by the fact that you wind up feeling like you are stuck in the doldrums.

A full manuscript request is a HUGE step forward, but a certain amount of apprehensiveness suddenly accompanies that submission. This feeling is overwhelming and has the ability to play one side of your mind against the other. In this (self) battle of wits, you wind up stalling in the query process and coming to a stop. This is what happened to me.

When the first request came, I immediately sent off the manuscript. The unintended consequence of that request was that my querying for the manuscript dropped from active, to passive. Instead of putting together query letters, I started looking at things like #pitmad and #MSWL. I did submit there, but only sparingly, as if agents had suddenly become a commodity I didn’t wish to squander on a manuscript that’s already being read elsewhere.

This, of course, is silly. Still…that’s what happened.

When the second request came, I was blindsided. I never expected one agent to want to see the manuscript, let alone two.

After that, querying stopped. Even though I knew I should have continued putting together materials and sending them out, my brain seemed frozen, as if the prospect of sending out more queries was suddenly scary.

And, truly, it is.

I never could have thought that agents reading my manuscript could be so nerve-wracking. In fact, when I first started the query process, I thought full requests would be things of pure joy, elevating me to egotistical heights that I couldn’t have imagined. At first, it did feel that way as I climbed to the rigging of my vessel and crowed my triumphs to the open sea (more nautical stuff…huzzah).

But that false edifice came crumbling down as time passed. After a week of sudden self-doubt and the inability to think about querying other agents, I forced myself to move on. That’s why I’ve been working on Infinity’s Heir. The act of writing helps take my mind off of what is and isn’t – this Schrödinger’s cat of querying.

I do retain hope that one of the agents will contact me with an offer of representation – that I will soon be able to call myself an author – but I worry about being too positive. I’ve learned to deal with rejections to query letters, but I’ve never had to deal with a rejection of my full manuscript. As hard as rejections to queries can wind up being, I can’t even imagine how it will feel to have an agent tell me the work isn’t right for them after they’ve read the entire thing.

But all of this comes with the territory.

When these two responses do eventually come, I suspect that my reaction to them will be consistent with the tone of the response. An offer of representation will send me into fits of joy, while a rejection will leave me crestfallen.

Based on the response, I have two very different strategies for how to move forward.

If the manuscript is offered representation, I will (obviously) accept and journey to wherever that path leads me (hopefully to a published novel).

If, however, the manuscript is rejected, the plan will be remarkably different. At that point, I will most likely retire Over the Edge for about six months or so and turn my attention to Infinity’s Heir. I’ll do my best to get that manuscript into shape before returning to my mystery novel. Hopefully, the time away from it will go a long way in tempering my own eyes to it. At that point, I’ll go back through and do another edit of the work before submitting it to agents again.

It’s not the best plan, but it’s a plan.

Until then, I’ll continue being hopeful and working on Infinity’s Heir, only occasionally glancing at my inbox for an eventual response. A positive one.

Finger’s crossed!