Waddling through Rejection

As you can see -- the blog posts have slowed down to a crawl since the summer ended.

I've been back to work, teaching up a storm, not to mention attending meetings, and sifting through papers with my purple pen.

We are in the home stretch of rehearsals for AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS. Our first show is this Saturday!

And rehearsals for the Radio Play (which is now called CHANGE THE STATION) are just in their infancy stages.

But the thing I've been most focused upon is MY GRAPHIC NOVEL... I have been (im)patiently waiting for responses from editors. My awesome agent sent Ducktown into the world on August 31st. It went out to 14 places. So far, we have received four rejections. They are all friendly rejections -- one in particular said a lot of very nice things about the plot of my graphic novel. However, the rejections share a common theme: They are not in love with the illustrations. It might turn out that my little drawings are too amateurish to make it past the gate-keepers.

My wife recently said, "You deal with rejection letters all the time. Why are these ones different?" And I guess the answer is, I'm really in love with these characters I have created... and I'm going to be sad if my fledgling skills as an illustrator prevent the story from being shared with others.

So, there's a very strong possibility that the 10 remaining editors will pass on this project, and Rainbow's story will go into the drawer with some of my other beloved novels that haven't found an audience yet. I've made peace with that possibility. There's a chance that, if this round of editors don't connect strongly enough with the story to overlook the visual flaws, maybe in the future, when my picture books become a big hit, I'll have stronger connections with publishers...

But perhaps I should be thinking more positively about Plan A instead of already emotionally resorting to Plan B. Ducktown still has a chance. Keep your feathers cross.