Apparently 48ish hours is more or less enough to recover from soul-crushing rejection. Although I’m still not very hungry. Hopefully the Rejection Diet will knock a few pounds off and keep ’em off, though. (Take your silver linings where you can get ’em, I guess.)
The plan at the moment is to tell Anna that she may keep the HoS manuscript for another three months, to re-read, as she wanted to do that, but she may not lend it to her sisters to read, and at the end of three months I would like it to either be returned or destroyed. Presumably destroyed, since I didn’t send a manuscript-sized SASE, but I’ll ask her if she wrote any notes on the ms itself and if she did I’ll send an envelope for her to return it in.
I figure three months is enough time for her to re-read it, and, y’know, who knows? She could change her mind about it in that time. But three months is also probably as quick as I can get any kind of response from any other publishing house, and at that point I don’t want Anna to have a copy of the manuscript because I don’t want to be in a position of appearing to have done multiple submissions of complete mss.
In the meantime, I’m going to keep working on the project I’m currently working on, and do a rewrite on the first 3 chapters of HoS and send it out probably sometime next week to, at the very least, Harlequin’s new Luna line and to Berkley’s new line, and possibly to places like Roc as well. Ah, and also to the agent I sent Urban Shaman to last week.
When I’m done with my current project, I think I’ll start working on Children of Proteus, and see if I can’t have something put together for that for Anna by the end of the year. I’d like very much to do that — get something to her by year’s end — because she was very positive about my writing and seemed genuinely enthusiastic about the prospect of reading more. And, as I am now armed with the knowledge of what she thinks my weak points are, I can keep an eye on those while writing a new book for her. So. That’s the tentative plan.