So I haven't written much here lately on my AK Flying book (still hopelessly without a decent title), but my agent Michele sent it out to all the editors in her "first tier" of publishers in December and I've been waiting to hear something ever since. Michele was pretty up front about how nothing was going to happen in December - it's pretty obvious to anyone who deals on any level with NY publishers that pretty much nothing seems to get done that month unless it absolutely has to (and no - I'm not being cranky, I'm just being observant) so I know that really, realistically, it was probably middle of last week to early this week before anyone even picked the manuscript up. But still. It's pretty hard not to be thinking about it all the time.

Honestly I feel like I'm back in those pitiful angst-ridden junior high days where I told my mother in fits of near hysteria, "It doesn't matter if you think I'm pretty - you have to! You're my mother!" (The irony that she had the exact same moments with her mother 25 years before is not lost on me.) It does not matter that I love my book, that my agent believes in it, that editors at failbetter and Storyglossia both loved my novel excerpts enough to run them - none of that matters if someone in the publishing world does not offer to pay me for it.

It's all about the dollars baby, and there's just no getting around that.

I found out a few days ago that an essay I wrote about my father will be running in Elysian Fields Quarterly the next month or so. (It's in their next issue.) It's about baseball, and what it meant to him and what it means to me because of that. It's a short emotional essay and I don't claim to be a baseball writer, but this was an important essay for me and I'm thrilled to pieces to have it accepted by EFQ. The first question though, everyone's first question, is: what are you getting paid for it? And the answer is nothing - again - and none of them really want to hear this. It diminishes my accomplishment when I tell them I won't be paid, it makes me even more unprofessional than I already seem with my internet publications and young adult reviewing. It reminds them - all of them - yet again that I am a hobbyist when it comes to writing and it is only by luck and my husband's awesome business ability that I can stay home and keep doing this.

Keep doing this little hobby.

I don't want my book to carry all of this emotional weight - I want it just to fly out there and be appreciated and find a home where others can enjoy it. I don't want it to have to prove so much to so many. I don't want it to, but I think it must. And so if it doesn't sell, if no one picks me, then I will be left with my reviewing, with my short stories, with my new essay soon to be out there in print and still I will be reminded that none of this is, apparently, real.

At what point do you get to say "I don't care what you fucking think - I am pretty, I am strong, I am smart and I am a writer." More importantly, at what point do finally not care?

Back to reviewing and the YA novel (now, finally with a title I love: The Violet Hour). Back to do something that at least I still believe in.