Hideous, Emotionally Exhausting, Completely Unavoidable

Anybody remember Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, Very Bad, No Good Day? Yeah. It's been like that lately. With slightly less whining and foot stomping, but also fewer understanding moms, absence of coddling moms being a hazard of growing up, getting a job and moving to California. 

I've been submitting queries for my co-written novel, though by submitting I mean I've been letting my co-author send out queries, get the rejections and then tell me about it. I tell you, it makes opening my email file an adventure in stomach tricks. Those aren't butterflies in there. More like agitated Green Horned Worms. 

And now it's my turn at the query wheel. My co-author took the first round of query only submissions. I'll handle the ones that want a query plus some random assortment of first pages, synopsis, blood sample/ability to spin straw into gold. So now I get to be the receiver/harbinger of email doom. 

Sometime in the coming month I have to get myself in gear to do it all over again for my own solo novel, Winter's Dawn. And if I'm really, really lucky and succeed as an author, I'll get to keep doing this periodically for the rest of my life. 

No wonder people fear success. Failure is faster and requires less effort.