Yay! I got my first rejection!

Yep, I have crossed another threshold. I have been rejected by an agent. Not from either of the two queries already mentioned, but from another I sent on the spur of the moment on Sunday evening. This was a long shot as this agent specialises in crime fiction, but her website said she was open to all genres, and she takes email queries, so I gave it a shot. A very polite form rejection was emailed to me today, which was very quick. I'm pretty sure the submitted chapters weren't read. I would guess she read the hook, and maybe the synopsis, and rejected on the basis of that. And that's fair enough, I think - if it wasn't her bag, so to speak, than it wasn't her bag.

I knew I'd have to face up to rejection at some point, and I wondered how I'd deal with it. It wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. As I keep reading online, my rejected query was just one of many, and it doesn't mean my book's no good, or she disliked me personally, or anything other than this idea didn't grab her. Will I still be so philisophical when I've got another 5, 10, 20, 50 rejections under my belt? I hope so. It isn't life or death, after all.

In the meantime, I'm going to continue writing. I haven't written anything for a while, and have instead been polishing Conduit. I'm conflicted on what to work on, though. I mentioned a dream inspired YA novel a while back - I've done two chapters of that, and I still like the idea a lot, so there's that to work on.

But, I've been toying with another idea for a few days - something very original in the horror vein that also crosses into one of my other passions - music. This is a novel I really want to write, but will need a fair bit of research. However, I think I can take one aspect of it and turn it into a short story, so I'm going to have a crack at that and see what happens before going back to my YA novel.