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 let her keep the manuscript for another three months, to re-read, as she wanted to do that, 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.
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 Tor 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.
Go Kit! Go Kit! Go Kit!