This is a venting post! I'm having some trouble with waiting for the results of Author Mentor Match, my self-esteem is low, and I feel like I'm going to get rejected from the program. I'm trying to prepare myself for what to do after the results of AMM are announced.
I realize this is an entirely irrational post, but I'm sharing it in case any of you might feel the same things I do.
Results of AMM are posted February 3rd.
So...why am I so impatient over this? Well, I found out (thanks to the #AMM, #AMMwaiting, and #AMMR9 Twitter hashtags) that after you send in your 50 pages/first 3 chapters along with your query letter and two-page synopsis, mentors who are interested in working with you will request your full manuscript. There were several announcements days ago that these were starting to go out, and I've gotten no requests. As I write this there are still ten days left before everything is announced, so it is possible I could get some type of request, but the fact that I've heard mentors talking on Twitter about already finding their mentee or already requesting fulls, I'm a bit discouraged.
I shared openly on Twitter being nervous about this, and AMM mentor Esme Symes-Smith kindly wrote to me that they never got mentorships or full requests, attempted Pitchwars, and then after a second failure with that program, got an agent. They wrote, "mentorships are only one, small path." This is sound advice for me to remember.
But it's so hard.
After taking a beating from beta readers and some critiques, I am hoping for a win. My contradictory feedback really lowered my self-esteem, and perhaps wrongly, I sought validation through something like AMM.
I also struggled with revisions for Son of the Siren, trying to satisfy the harsher criticisms towards my book about my antagonist and what she does to the protagonist. I was hoping getting feedback from a mentor through AMM would help me work through some of that in addition to assuring the book is publishable.
Again, there are ten days left before the final results of AMM, so I could very well be working myself into a frenzy. It is something I have a tendency to do.
I also have a problem with thinking about the future instead of keeping to the present...but I always feel like I need to have another goal in mind, something to work towards. Hence the second part of this post!
Next steps?
This will go either two ways--I'll get a mentor, or I won't.
If I get a mentor...that means I'll get developmental feedback in addition to line edits directly in the document. I'll also have opportunities to ask questions about the publishing business and querying and other things.
If I don't get a mentor...I'm thinking I need at least one or two more readers for this book. The first version was 79,000 words and the latest version is 84,000. I added more and tried to slow things down in addition to working on the romance and the issues mentioned above, but I don't know if the book is better off for it. It was very difficult to revise. I just want a sanity check from someone on it. I think I'm done revising unless someone identifies an enormous problem with it, but I just want big-picture feedback at this point. Then I'll query agents! I'm building a spreadsheet of them now and continually researching, so I hope to have a batch ready to apply to soon.