Holiday Blues

I got the editorial letter, and it was nothing to fret about - got it all done yesterday, with only a couple of points of disagreement. One of which was about the subjunctive and I will win that one. (Don't try to take away my Oxford comma, either!) I guess after more than ten years of polishing Sullivan was pretty close to publisher-ready. Which means I should be doing market research this morning. So here I am.

Ah, blogging - the ultimate procrastination tool. "I'm not really putting off doing market research, I'm maintaining my online presence!"

Market research is even harder this time of year, because of the heavy leaden certainty that, even if I find the perfect match, and send off the perfect query, no one will read it or ask to see a full till January. Christmas and New Year are almost upon us. People are reluctant to start things, are taking vacations, are clearing old business off their desks. The perennially overworked, overstressed, manuscript-inundated editorial staffs of absolutely everywhere have holiday and year-end stress on top of their normal load. The spammers have pulled out the big guns (spam traffic is way up in my blog comments and mailbox, too) and are swamping the filters, burying e-mail queries in amazing holiday offers, and dunning letters, Christmas cards, and packages have inundated the post office and corporate mailrooms so that traditional queries stand a good chance of being buried there, too.

On the bright side (?), I'm likely to see a number of rejections as people get rid of the stack of "meh" that's been building up. But so many people have gone to "no response = rejection" that I can't even count on that.

I can, of course, get my ducks in a row to send things out New Year's weekend, to get in on the bright shiny new ambition and determination to knuckle down that everybody has when they come back to work after the holidays. I tell myself that's what I'm doing.

And then I realize I've been staring at the same Publishers Marketplace entry for ten minutes and have been thinking about...no, that's too embarrassing, no need to tell the world what I was really thinking about. (And you are now imagining something much, much more embarrassing than the truth, so stop it.)

Yeah, so, it's hard for everybody.

Just do it.

Happy Christmas.