I’m sitting here, waiting for my novel to print. Three hundred and fifty five pages, double spaced, Times New Roman 12 point. The stack of already printed pages is staggering already, and there are 144 more to go. I’m going to take it, and my toddler, outside in the hopes that she’ll splash in her wading pool for a few minutes and let me get some work done.

Ruby is going to Las Vegas tomorrow afternoon to spend a week with her grandparents. Adrienne and Nick are already there with their dad. We’ll pick them all up on the sixth of July. So here’s my plan. I’m going to work on this story today and tomorrow. The week that I have no kids at all, I’m going to dedicate to my new novel. Hopefully that will give the ideas for revisions on Devil You Don’t some time to peculate. That seems to be how my brain works.

I’m choosing to focus on this sentence from the not-quite-rejection: “Please know that if we did not see promise in the manuscript we wouldn’t be sending back such detailed information.”

I heard back from Pink Petal Books today. They sent me a revise and resubmit letter. That’s considerably better than a rejection. My brain knows that. My heart is a little heavy. But I’ll live. At least I know what the problems are, and I can fix them. One is a pretty major change to the structure of my story, and in retrospect I think I knew all along that it didn’t quite work. So, I’m going to see what I can do about fixing things up and get it back to them. And try to keep reminding myself that this is a step up from the stack of form rejections I have hidden in a desk drawer.