A Major Milestone

Welcome to The Desk in the Lantern Room. Today, we will be cracking open The Keeper’s Logbook and reviewing some entries. Some big ones.

For some reason, major writing milestones keep falling near my birthday (2/20). For multiple years now, I’ve taken this opportunity to treat myself and either start or finish a project. Sometimes both.

2/20/23 - I finished writing the first draft of The Wheel, which is now finished and serialized in its entirety.

2/23/23 - I began writing a short story named Rue. (The short story version was short-lived. Seven months later, I was roughly a third of the way through expanding Rue into a novel.)

2/20/24 - I read Rue in novel form for the first time.

2/21/25 - I finished the second draft of The Water Tower, which is likely the next story I’ll post here.

2/3/25 - I started sending query letters and novel samples of Rue out to nine literary agents.

That’s it. That last one is the big one. If you would have told me nearly three years ago that I’d be attempting to sell a full-blown novel at this point, I’m not sure I would have believed you. I’m not even sure when I accepted the fact that I am a writer. I hadn’t done it before, nobody told me how to do it, and guys like me don’t just become writers…

Until we do.

Sending that first letter last night was so strangely surreal. And terrifying. I could have vibrated out of my chair. I could have lain down and died. Instead, I sent a few more and then the rest today. That means that as of this moment, there is nothing more I can do with Rue. Considering this has been my main project for three years, I don’t even know what to do with myself right now.

The only thing I must do is wait—wait for the rejection emails to roll in over the coming days and weeks, most likely. Of course, there is always the chance that one or more of the agents from the first round will request the full manuscript and then offer to represent me. It happens to some people, but it is very rare. The odds are quite low, and in fact, I’ve received one rejection already. It was very kind, and I know it was actually personalized because it responded to the unique first line of my query letter, but went on to say that he isn’t looking for fiction right now. That’s ok. The fact that he didn’t refer me to another person in the agency likely indicates he didn’t care for it either, but spared me the hurt. That’s a bummer, but also ok.

If I get eight more rejections, that just means it’s time to dig up another round of agents and start again. Plenty have done it before me, plenty will do it again. With any luck, I’ll receive some feedback that will give me better chances for round two.

In the meantime, what in the hell do I do with my writerly self? My mind immediately goes to the things I should do: revise and serialize The Water Tower on Substack, revise other pending short stories, or the big one: read my second novel, Gull Island.

The problem is, all of those things lead to more work—no matter how enjoyable that work might be—and I’ve been working non-stop on Rue for five months. I’ve got a terrible responsibility problem. It’s hard enough to say no to these things. If I were to start on one of them, I wouldn’t be able to allow myself to do anything else until that thing was done.

So for now, I’m going to try to force myself to do some fun stuff. Actually read a book for no other reason than that I want to, write short stories, respond to some prompts from other Substackers…

But in two weeks it’s my birthday, and at that point it will have been nearly eighteen months since I finished writing Gull Island. I think reading that for the first time might have to be this year’s self-gift, even if it leads to a whole lot of work.

Two weeks of fun, that’s what I’ve got. Hopefully, that will result in more posts here. We will see.

Unless, of course, I hit the jackpot and an agent wants to get down to work on this manuscript of mine ASAP.

Anyway, thanks for reading and thanks to everyone who supported me, read Rue in its various stages over the years, and gave me the feedback that helped make it the pretty darn solid novel that it is. I do think it’s pretty good, so we can only hope that I grab an agent’s attention long enough for them to read it and decide if they agree. Either way, my fate now rests with others outside these four walls, and that is both weird, scary, and exciting.

That’s it, that’s the update. Stay tuned!

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