this time i'm mistaken for handing you a heart worth breaking

It's definitely time for bed -- I've done far more stuff today than I wanted to have to do, and I need to go to sleep so that I don't oversleep and miss my flight!

Today was generally pretty up and down. I made the mistake of checking my personal email while walking between two meetings and discovered that I had been very speedily rejected by the agent I was so excited about earlier this week. The only good news is that clearly my letter had excited her enough to check out the manuscript as soon as it arrived. I guess the other good news is that she provided "constructive" feedback, which I appreciate now, but when I read it between meetings, it felt like a knife to the heart. I'm not surprised, exactly; the first part of my book is weaker than the last two-thirds because I rewrote pieces but probably should have rewritten the whole thing, and I don't think she made it past the library scene at the end of chapter three, which she seemed to take major issue with because a) I switched point of view too many times, leading her to think that's endemic in my book even though I don't really do it anywhere else, and b) she thought it was unrealistic and historically inaccurate that they would have gotten together like that.

So I'm disappointed, but I'm not going to think about it for awhile; I don't want to set aside Ferguson and Madeleine to fix Book 1, because the whole problem of Book 1 was that I set aside the beginning for too long and then had trouble continuing it. I'm going to stick to my plan and write at least the first draft of book 2, and see what the other agents currently holding material have to say -- but I might take a breather from the agent submissions and reevaluate the first 70 pages of book 1 before submitting it broadly again, in case the problems she highlighted are serious dealbreakers.

That was all pretty blah. I was in the office from 8am to 2:30pm, and I left early so that I could come home, do laundry, pack, and wrap up some work stuff. My work day was really full (I somehow got scheduled for consecutive meetings with my boss, my boss's boss, and my boss's boss's boss in the same 2.5hr period, which should be illegal), and then I had a lot of stuff to wrap up and a strong need to figure out what to pack and what to leave behind, so I'm not totally relaxed. I still have one work thing I'll have to do on vacation (a couple of letters of recommendation for someone who's applying to business school -- good luck, dude, since this is the third round and third round is usually tough anyway, even without this being the most difficult admissions year in over a decade). But, hopefully I can do some of it in the airport tomorrow morning once I'm through security, so that by the time I get on the plane I can stop thinking about work.

One final thought -- my dad helped me to see, although I've seen it before and promptly blocked it, that I'm effectively working for the company that's destroying all the companies that could make my publishing dreams come true. Corporate whoredom is a well-known concept, but how many people can say they're actively engaged in killing their own dream? At least for the next week, though, I'll be more focused on sun than self-sabotage, which is a v. good thing. Goodnight!