Liberating

A new years resolution, to clean out the home office, is proceeding apace.  I only have a couple file cabinets left to go.  Not much, considering the piles and piles of paper that have been carted away for recycling.

Today I cleaned up another big ugly pile: lists and lists of literary agents, their web sites, interviews, lists of whom to query for what book, rejections, magazine articles on how to find an agent. . . I dumped 98% of everything.  It wasn't depressing, well, just a little, to think of all the time and effort gone for naught, but it was really liberating, just wonderfully liberating.  Crap going back to 2004.  Lots of crap. 

I can start fresh.  One just-finished novel to query, a short story or two to send around, and one novel with a publisher (waiting for them to decline) and two move novels with another publisher, not the full manuscripts, but just the first ten pages, and I get the feeling I won't even hear from her.  A virtual decline.   O.K.  Good riddance.

Good riddance to everything, good riddance to the big heavy wastebasket full of paper.  Who knows?  Maybe half those agents are no longer agents. New ones come in to take their place.  Just like writers. Goodbye, adieu, hasta luego.   Tschuss!

In another year, I may have three, count 'em, three more books out there on Kindle.  Somehow, this is more exciting than all these tedious queries, now mostly unanswered since email.  Email should make it easier to answer queries, right?  Nobody does anymore.  Merde.  Hey, we are your customers.  Ignore us at your peril.

So liberating.  I'm going to go upstairs and drink a glass of plonk and eat a bit of brie.  The office looks so good.  I have even begun to dust, now that there are empty places to drag the Pledge Wipes across.  This, too, is liberating.

Why did I wait so long?