So you’ve done it. You’ve written a book. You’ve sent it to friends, bribed those friends to read it, and made edits and revisions. All that long, painful work. You’ve even sent it out to agents, thinking now you’ve hit the easy part, the lull. A chance to relax without having to think about your plot, your character arcs, and your descriptions. But you’re wrong. Querying is hell, a wait that often ends with form rejection, and only sometimes, rarely, a request.
But maybe these five fun things will help relieve that long, terrible wait.
- Eat! You’re going to need to eat, anyway, since you’re going to be waiting up to a hundred years. If you eat through your anxiety until the point of being so full you’re in pain, you won’t know if your stomach troubles are anxiety-related or from all the cheese.
- Read your book again! As soon as you submit it to the wide world, you’re going to find all the typos you missed the first twenty times you read your book!
- Watch a show you’ve seen a hundred times before. It’s supposed to be good for anxiety, knowing what will happen to all the characters. Unfortunately, knowing what happens to the characters in your book doesn’t lessen your anxiety at all, just makes you think of all the weakest moments of your book, and that industry professionals are probably reading those parts right now.
- Cry! You’re going to get rejections. Everyone gets rejections. It’s best to get the crying out of the way early, so you can face the rest of the rejections with a kind of vague numbness.
- Start your next book. This may feel like giving up, but in the 2-12 months it’ll take to hear back from all your queries (if you hear back at all), you’ll have another draft to work with. You might even have a book ready to start this whole process again!
