On the Timesuck Vortex of Waiting

If there's one thing the process of querying has taught me, it's this: patience.

I am an impulsive, impatient person by nature. I'm quick to learn, reluctant to drill and practice. Writing's the one thing that's challenged me consistently, and the first out of many things that showed me that above luck, above talent, it's the hard work that makes things happen. It smoothed some of that impatience out of me.

There was that one thing though--writing was controlled by me, and me alone. I had my timeframe in my hands.

But when you submit your work out--when you send your manuscript baby out, or submit it to betas and CPs--you hand over some of that control. You get introduced to this little rascal, called Waiting.

Waiting is hard. Waiting is agonizing. There were times when I refreshed my email inbox 100 times a day. When I clicked on my mail app every 4 minutes.

I don't do that anymore.

Sarah J. Maas says that querying makes you a spine of steel. I think she's right.  For me, it's not the requests or rejections that define querying for me, but the waiting.

Strangely, now I'm okay with this. Even from the beginning, when I was frazzled and impatient, I seemed to instinctively understand from the get-go that publishing would be a waiting game, and now I've internalized it. It's not like I'm in no hurry--I still have quite an ambitious mentality--but I've become quite accepting of the process.

April is so busy with crazy schoolwork and extracurriculars that it's taken my mind off from querying. A little.