I was totally bummed. I feel like I can’t win with this dang book! One day I get a great piece of news, the next I get a rejection. (Hopefully, as a writer you know that having an agent isn’t the end all. It doesn’t mean your book will easily get published once you sign. I think that’s a misconception out there).

Anyway, it was interesting because that same day I read a blog from Rachelle Gardner. She is an agent and has one of the best blogs out there on writing (I’m not the only one who feels this way; the blog was voted a 101 top website for writers by Writer’s Digest). The blog discussed how subjective writing is. Often writers complain about how many garbage books get published (I know I’ve done this). To which she made an excellent point that there’s music we don’t like, clothes we won’t wear, food we won’t eat, and so on. Writing is subjective. What is art to one person might be trash to another.

And so, even with the rejections coming, as a writer you have to keep going, knowing that someday someone will see what you see in your writing and they’ll want to buy it. That’s what I keep telling myself anyway. What about you? What do you tell yourself when you receive those rejections? What keeps you going? I’d like to hear J

Hope you have a wonderful weekend!

-Sandi

P.S. Rachelle is running a great contest right now. Write your pitch in a 100 words. The top 10 will get opportunities to blog on her site, which has huge traffic! Check her blog out!

The Debutantes

http://community.livejournal.com/debut2009

This is a group of debut middle-grade and YA authors whose books will release this year. I enjoyed reading the summaries of their books. Here are the ones that I plan on picking up:

“Lipstick Apology” by Jennifer Jabaley. Razorbill.
Emily’s world falls apart when her parents die in a plane crash. To add to it, her mother had written the words “Emily please forgive me” in lipstick across the tray table. Emily must figure out what it means while also starting her new life.

“As You Wish” by Jackson Pearce. HarperTeen. Viola summons a young jinn out of his world and grants her three wishes. She deals with romantic complexities and the high school social scene.

• “Shadowed Summer” by Saundra Mitchell. Delacorte.
• One summer a boy disappears and no one knows what happened to him, though everyone has a theory. Ten years later, fourteen-year-old Rhame is determined to find out the truth.

“The Espressologist” by Kristina Springer. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Seventeen-year-old Jane can match-make couples based on their favorite coffee drinks (what she calls Espressology).  A local coffee shop uses her as a promotion and sales go crazy. But during an interview with local media Jane is faced with a dilemma—choose her own love or her business.

“Twenty Boy Summer” by Sarah Ockler. Little, Brown. Anna is going on a vacation and agrees with her friend to meet one boy everyday. What her friend doesn’t know is that Anna is holding secrets about what happened between her and her friend’s older brother last year before he died.

“Hate List” by Jennifer Brown. Little, Brown. Valerie’s boyfriend opens fire on his school. Valerie is hurt trying to save someone else, but is later implicated because she helped her boyfriend write a “hate list.” Now with her senior year in front of her, she must move on and work through the tragedy.