Met my goal tonight on the second novel and stopped writing with the muse(s) still chattering. It's been a little over a month since I finished edits on Book of Icons (now that you know that it has a name, that makes it legit), and I've received a response from every agent and publisher I queried. I'll say one thing for rejections in this season: they're awful timely. Grieved as I was a few days ago when I received the last one (and those of you unlucky enough to have befriended me on Facebook and suffer live action roleplaying photographs as well as childish rants, forgive me), there was one line in particular from the letter that made me feel something totally inappropriate: triumph. The publisher claimed that they did not feel my novel would be a "commercial success" in the current market. It's a form letter and I'm not taking it (too much) to heart, but I can't help but feel that when I look at the current market, when I discard book after book after book after only three chapters reading, that while of course I'm writing because I want to be read, I'd rather it were for the right reasons, by the right people. If to be commercially successful I've got to scrap whimsy (which isn't to say I believe that I do), I'm not gonna. I joke big time about writing lusty vampire fiction because it seems to me when agents say they want fantasy they don't mean epic, and when they do, they want Robert Jordan. But while there are some gals who are writing urban fantasy in a seriously spectacular way, those aren't the dreams I'm dreaming.

I'd be lying if I said I didn't want to make money, didn't want to make it big. But I can't be something I'm not, can't write what my heart isn't in. And for now, it's this story, this girl who is more than she appears to be and more still. It's spinning folktales fat as spiders that in turn spin themselves, my cob-webbed brain resurrecting all of the things that I love best about living and reading, licking and sticking and pinning them on the page like postage stamps or luna moths. I'm writing for me. For now.