Yes, well. There would be no other way to put it. FAIL.
A month or so ago, I finished my novel, and then I shipped it off to my agent. He got back to me today, and he was basically like this sucks ass. He didn't say that. It was more like, "This is a hot mess." Only he didn't say that either. In fact, he was very nice and kind, but, you know, firm, like when you get in trouble with your father. It was more like he said: This doesn't work. And the only thing I could think was: But he's right. And he was. So, oh, well! A year of my life and 200+ pages down the drain. It's not like it meant anything.
Surely, in the last three years of my life, I have grown accustomed to failure. A long time ago, when I was another person, I used to actually say things like: "I never fail." Ha! The audacity. Or, put another way, what a jerkoff. Surely, this is my contrapasso. Since I am weak of will, my first reaction was to go and dump the whole lot of it and become, like, a nun or something. Instead of an alcoholic calling his sponsor, I emailed a couple of writers. Thank you to C and T, for being nice to me, for talking me down from the ledge. As Martha Stewart would say, it's a good thing.
The thing-thing, though, was that I did not have a mental breakdown, which, in all seriousness, is what I was worried about since the start of this whole godforsaken thing. About four years ago, minus a couple weeks, I had some kind of apocalyptic mental breakdown that led to chronic fantasies of either sucking on the gas pipe, blowing my brains out, or ODing on available pills. That's what I was worried about happening. But it didn't. There was this weird way in which I simply did not care. I didn't even cry or anything. Not yet, anyway.
Anyhow, my agent did tell me what to do. So, I'm going to try doing that. It requires a wholesale, do-it-all-over-again, start-to-finish redo. But, fuck it. What the hell else am I going to do with the rest of my life? Whatever. What do you do? You slog on.
