caught between the devil and the deep blue sea

Today was not a good day. I woke up with a headache, which only got worse when I checked my email and found a rejection letter from an agent -- even worse, one of the agents who had the first fifty pages of my book. Then, it took almost an hour and a half to get to work, and none of my meetings were really meetings that I wanted to be in (none of them were bad, but they weren't exactly therapeutic for my smashing headache either). So, I left early, spent a bit of time with Terry at one of the main campus cafes, and then came home; at least I made it home before it rained, so I suppose one thing went well.

I'm trying v. hard to focus on the good things about the rejection letter (that I am "a good writer with a distinctive voice" and have a "nice way with characterization"). I'm trying v. hard not to take the bad things (that she found it "interesting but not compelling enough to go to bat for") too much to heart. I am also trying to remember that the road to publication is paved with many, many rejections -- but of course the girl within who wants to be not just published, but multi-published, showered in writing honors and accolades, and able to live off of her writing while pushing the envelope in multiple genres, secretly dreamed that she would get picked up by an agent with minimal trauma.

Sometimes I want to shoot that girl in the face. Ambition is one of those weird half-taboo subjects; if you don't have it, you're looked down upon, but if you have too much, the masses claw you back into place. And while there is really very little about myself that I would change at the current moment (a miracle in itself), there are times when I recognize that my life would be easier and I would probably be more satisfied if the ambitious side of me finally gave up and crawled back into the deepest cesspool of my soul.

However, that side shakes things like this off better than the sensitive side (Ambition Girl is already dreaming of revenge, while Sensitive Girl is still crying about not being "compelling enough"), and so I'm already thinking about my next move. The hours it took for Ambition Girl to bounce back, though, were admittedly a little rough. So perhaps my brother had some good luck today, given that mine was poor!

Anyway, I spent the evening doing the reading for my short story class (Denis Johnson's "Jesus' Son"). Oddly, a couple of the stories were set in Iowa, although it sounds like he was hanging with the methheads rather than the dorks. Again, I have no idea what I'm going to write -- but at least I have several days to consider it. Now, though, I'm going to bed, in hopes that a great night's sleep will cure my headache and get Sensitive Girl to rally enough to curb some of Ambition Girl's darker tendencies. Goodnight!