It’s becoming clearer every day that the writing life is not one for the faint of heart. Finding Frances is out with 10 agents, probably all rejections I’ll never explicitly get. I think I’m done sending it out. It will just be a bonus for whatever agent picks up one of my other books. I just went through Ugly again for a nice solid draft. But it’s truly just a draft. I know there are problems with it. It needs more emotional depth. The subplots and aspects of the main character’s life need more development. And the problem is that I don’t really know how to do these things.

I’m also struggling to keep up with my reading schedule. I try to read two books a week—because you have to read widely in your genres or you can’t be a real writer, in my view. This is tough with a full-time job.

But still, it can be rewarding. Even though my draft of Ugly isn’t great, it’s good and that was nice to see. And I’ve written 6 books (just 3 YA), which is an accomplishment, even if they’re not all polished.

When I was in my 20s, I wrote a lot and even submitted my work to magazines. I once got a rejection where the editor said, “The author isn’t as funny as he thinks he is.” Ignoring the wrong pronoun, that still stung. It actually made me stop writing. I intended to start again at some point, but I thought I must just need more life experience. I knew I had the basic ability to write, but what I didn’t know was that that wasn’t enough. More life experience wouldn’t cut it. Writing is a craft. You have to constantly work on developing your skills. I’m sure there are writers who don’t really need more development—Stephen King, for instance—but most of us always have stuff to learn.

When I did decide to seriously write again, my motivation and plan seem hilarious now. I was very unhappy in my job and thought, “I’ll just write a novel for NaNoWriMo, spend some time polishing it, get it published and then in a couple years I’ll be able to quit my job.” Ha. That’s so not how things work. Many successful writers have to have other jobs (a lot supplement by teaching writing), and many work full-time jobs. So I don’t envision ever quitting my job. Which is okay because I finally got what is basically my dream job, when I transferred to a new department in December.

Anyway. I’ve got to work on one of the non-YA books, while I let Ugly steep a bit more. So I should get back to it.