Rejection is always personal

A quick e-mail rejection from an agent who purported to like foreign settings, a strong heroine and a good dose of suspense. Holy Smokes! She was describing World of Mirrors. I sent off a query and a few days later received an email "form" rejection, very like the written ones. One characteristic the written ones have in common is that half the rejection is apologizing for being so impersonal. I probably should have sent the first page of the first chapter and not the first page of the prologue, but what the hell?

Anyway, that makes something like 54 negative responses. There are also 17 agents who did not respond at all, which is a 24% rate of no response whatsoever. That seems to be increasing. I googled an agent whom I was considering querying, and the first thing that pops up, is a complaint that she never responded to the query. At 82 cents a whack, that brings a bit of financial pain into the equation as well as extreme frustration. What do do? Suck it up. Currently, I am hopeful that the crop of agents with a portion of the MS will come through, but then I am always hopeful.

This is really a fun book. Murder, betrayal, sex, all the good stuff along with humor, sailing, craziness, nude beaches, animal rescue. I dunno. Maybe it's a tossed salad with both fruit and veggies, an aquired taste.

My writing group trashed the opening pages of Festival Madness, which is good, because the opening pages are very important and I have to get it right. It's like a synopsis. The book itself is easy, it's the first 7 pages that are a bitch. It will be good to get away from crime fiction for a spell and try to write in no genre.

Onward if not upward.