Feeling like I’ve been here before: IWSG post

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: I’m getting ready to query a new book.

Oh, yeah, that’s come up once or twice on the blog. So many times in fact I have many agents and agencies memorized. I’d be lying if I said I was perfectly confident that this time—THIS TIME!—would be different.

I’ve had dozens of full requests, I get personalized feedback on my query letters. And I have hundreds of rejections. Hundreds. And yet, here I am with another book, making my list, checking it twice, finishing up the draft and making notes for revisions.

It is the definition of insanity to try the same thing and expect a different result, and YET HERE I AM, because this is “the process.” At this point, it’s probably fair to say that I’ve lost faith in the process. I’m not saying that it doesn’t work, it just doesn’t appear to be working for me. It’s like I’ve come to live in a world where there is an invisible line I cannot seem to cross. It starts to feel like that time I agreed to tutor one of the guys in my physics class and after I showed him the mnemonic for memorizing the formulas, he showed me how ALL THE OTHER BOYS WERE CHEATING on the exams. Literally everyone knew this one trick (and it was cheating, to be clear), but for three years they hadn’t told me, the only girl, about this one thing.

Watching other writers find their forever homes for their books feels like that. It feels like there’s a secret club and I’m somehow just not smart enough/good enough/stubborn enough to get there. It feels like there’s a cheat code I don’t know about, but everyone else does.

I’ve tried everything to find that cheat code: Writer’s conferences, workshops, crit groups, professional editors, agent critiques. I put every first page and query up for critique on every writing podcast with a critique show (You’ve almost certainly heard or read one of my queries). I’ve participated in so many query contests and received so much feedback, that I now know what does and does not work for me.

Still, I keep hacking away at the process. I’m polishing my manuscript. I’m crafting my query, and I’m girding my heart against the process, worried that this next attempt will end like all the ones that came before it. All I can do is keeping doing.

At least there is one thing I can say from my experience: I’ve tried everything. I’ve followed every rule. I’ve tried to be the perfect little writer, the perfect representation of what I’ve thought the world wanted of me, and NONE OF THAT worked. I’ve tried being me, and that didn’t work much better, but I enjoyed it more. Maybe the point of this process is to find my voice in the storm? Anyways, I’ll be sending my owls into the night again, and I’ll just be over here practicing deep breaths.

Don’t forget, this is a blog hop! Head on over to Ninja Captain Alex’s blog and jump on the Linky. Be sure to visit the cohosts Dolorah @ Book Lover, Christopher D. Votey,Tanya Miranda, and Chemist Ken!

What to do when things go wrong in a pitch contest

I made a video from the Writing Cave. I talk a little bit about revisions but mostly about Pitch Wars and what to do if you don't get picked for PitchWars.

Good luck, and happy writing!

Rushing to Happily Ever After: IWSG

If there’s one piece of advice writers like to give other writers, it’s “Don’t compare yourself to others.”

I cannot tell you how many times I sat with my laptop, viewing the success of others and reading the unwritten subtext put there just for me: You’re a failure because you don’t have an agent/book/deal/best pound cake on the block.

To be clear, the subtext of almost every book deal and I got an agent post is “Oh, gods, please don’t see that I’m a fake and have managed to completely bamboozle this person into liking my work! I’m so happy, but TERRIFIED because no one talks about the After in Happily Ever After.”

Yes there are a lot of writers who feel like they worked hard and deserve it (I applaud you confident writers who don’t suffer from the dreaded impostor syndrome), but there are heaps tons more who feel like some person with a clipboard is going to show up and say “I’m sorry, but we both know you’re a fraud.” (this, is a direct quote from Neil Gaiman’s Make Good Art commencement speech, good stuff)

Our stories tell us that the part that’s actually super hard is something those movie people cover up with one song (usually edited), and the whole process is really a great backdrop for a Rom Com. The stories most of us consume have endings (some happy, some not), and we try to fit our lives into these story templates. And it doesn’t work. We compare to other people, and we see that what they present to the internet fits the mold: worked hard, made the thing, queried and got the agent, BOOK DEAL!

It’s the perfect happily ever after rolled up in blog posts and tweets. Sometimes these success stories feel like fairytales, all wrapped up with a perfect little bow. And do you know what bearing this has on your journey?

None. Absolutely none.

If you’re anything like me, you’ll tear yourself apart comparing yourself to these fairytales. And they aren’t real. The path in writing is so very unclear. So much is about taste and preference, it’ll kill you to go about assuming the normal rules apply to publishing and agents and writing.

In the movies (which we’ve been taught to use as our gauge of how to process the world), it’s simple: You work hard, you put in the time, and you get the reward. Our stories are built this way so we understand that our culture values hard work. Unfortunately, the formula in movies doesn’t pan out in real life. In real life, you can work as hard as is humanly possible, and the reward you were working for might not come. You did nothing wrong, but you don’t win the game or get the book deal/agent/job. And we don’t have many stories like that even if it is a reality of our world.

But Rena, how can you talk about disappointment when you have Book Deals and even a book coming out in November??

Oh, sweet summer child, I know more pain than can be seen in my scars. I struggle everyday with the doubt born of how I clearly bamboozled my way into having a book deal, but I’ve never been a good enough con-artist to get an agent. My rejections folder is filled with “Not right for me,” “Send me your next project,” “I’m sure someone will snatch this up if they haven’t already.”

And I know those sound like I’m on the right track, but those were responses I got with the second book I queried. I’ve queried a number since then, and I still get those responses. And some of that is my fault. I tend to query my books too early. I have taken some of those books and revised them and that’s how I got my book deals (you know, after collecting a no from every agent who will even read SFF).

And here I am, on the brink of #Pitchwars with the very awkward path of trying to get a mentor for a book I’m probably rushing towards a Happily Ever After that probably doesn’t really exist while juggling an upcoming book release, trying to plot out another sequel and promotion. It’s awkward. I was supposed to get the agent, then get the book deal. I never did anything the standard way, but I’m worried my rush to get to Happily Ever After may have hamstringed my attempts to get an agent. I’m worried I’m no longer a fresh naïve writer. I’m wiser now, but I’m still worried I’m rushing. Just the other day, I realized there was a major revision I could put into my manuscript to make it significantly cooler, so I’m trying to nail that down before I throw my hat into the arena.

So that’s this month’s insecurity. How about you all, anyone else struggle with rushing their projects?

Life After The Contract: Which Manuscript Was That?

I’ve mentioned that some things change when you sign a contract. Today is life after contract, the endless edits keep me from writing my next book edition.

I tweeted earlier today that within 14 hours of finishing a round of edits on one book, I received another round of edits for a different book, and this is now my life. My plan had been to draft between when I'd finished one set and received the next set. To be clear, I didn't write a novel in those 14 hours...

As of this exact second, I am juggling what can only be referred to as a ton of novels. A list:

MS 1: in pre-publishing edits

MS 2: on submission with publisher

MS 3: in the query trenches

MS 4: being drafted on lunch breaks with a wireless keyboard hooked up to my phone (this is the only time I can’t work on edits as I can’t take my computer to work without being willing to submit it to time consuming inspection by IT peeps—yes, my work is sensitive, but not at all how you think)

MS 5: in development

MS 6: waiting to go into the editing grinder

Yes, I have six novels running at the same time. Six. So at any moment, I could have good or bad news from an agent, an editor, or a crit partner, and I’m trying to stick words to the page. It’s a lot to manage. (and my email is officially a ticking time bomb).

Now, I don’t say this to brag, but I think sometimes we don’t consider what consequences our actions have. Action: I’ve written a lot of books. Consequence: finding a home for those books takes time. I wrote MS 2 in 2016. I wrote MS 1 in 2009 (yeah, it’s been a long haul with that book).

At one point, I looked up from my writing work and realized I knew exactly what I needed to be writing for the next three years, and that hit me in the creative noodle. I’d never been under contract. I’d just been frolicking about in the land of dreaming up the next great big book to lure an unsuspecting agent into my snare. Then suddenly, I know what I’m trying to put together creatively for the next few years. That’s a heck of a commitment.

I don’t regret any of it. I love the work I’m doing, but it sort of shocked me to realize that I started my publishing journey in 2009, I’m two books in, and my writing docket is all tied up until the end of the decade.

So I did something big name authors do all the time: I stole time from somewhere else to develop another project. MS 4 in that list has nothing to do with any of the other novels. Literally nothing alike. It’s not even an explosion filled action piece (but it does have dragons!). I found a piece of time I had, lunches and breaks at work, and figured out how to convert them into words. So far, so good. I’m averaging about 2K a week on drafting while I’m working on the endless edits for projects under contract.

Because here’s another hard truth: once you’re published, you still have to do EVERYTHING ELSE you had to do before you were published, plus revise, edit, and polish a manuscript. Market, prep, write a sequel, and do it again. And if you’re lucky, do it again. All the while, cooking dinners, cleaning house and fulfilling the whole full time job gig too. I’m lucky in that my SO picks up the slack when I’m ready to throw poptarts at the family, but I have to admit, my ability to create new work in the crunched time was one of the hardest adjustments.

So there it is, folks, find a way to steal time and write the next book. If that advice sounds familiar, it should. Writing the next book is almost always the answer. 

Being skilled doesn't mean you'll get an agent, but it helps

One of the most important things I’ve learned about writing since I released a book with Curiosity Quills, is that Publishing is subjective.

When I queried the book that became Acne, Asthma, And Other Signs You Might Be Half Dragon, agents said they loved it, just not enough to represent it. As time went on I came to learn that there was a book very similar to mine that apparently flopped, and so my book was relegated to the back burners for a ton of agents because of a business happening.

At the time, what I thought was that all these agents were being nice. The invitations to sub again with a new project? Just politeness.

I had come to equate skill in writing with getting an agent. To a certain extent, that’s true. If the writing is really terrible, it’s very unlikely to be the one that lands an agent. On the other hand, even if your writing is spectacular and impeccable, if there’s something fundamentally not matched to the agent, or your story is in the unsalable category, it’s very unlikely to be something agents are after.

From the writer’s side, there’s a feeling that if my book is just good enough (great even), then I will have crossed that magic threshold of skill and be on to the realm of agent land, and it’s just not true. I really wish I had understood this earlier in my writing, and, to be honest, I still suffer a bit from this misconception. But today I’m here to remind all my writer friends that there’s something else, something more than skill when it comes to finding an agent. It's fit. It's passion. It's all the things you have about your book, the untranslatable bits that make you love it. If your agent doesn't have those feels too, it's not going to work. And I've seen enough writers part with their agents to know that process isn't always a walk in the park, but it's often a hit to the self confidence. They tell me it's worth waiting for the right one. 

What do you guys think? Do you feel like rejection is an indication of low skill and quality?

IWSG: a little something

Insecure Writer's Support Group is brought to you by the concerted efforts of The NINJA Captain, Alex. This month he's roped Julie Flanders, Murees Dupé, Dolorah at Book Lover, Christine Rains, and Heather Gardner into cohosting, so be sure to visit their blogs and give them a high five for patrolling the neighborhood.

I am not gonna lie: I had a super deep and meaningful post lined up. But sometimes, deep and meaningful isn't as important as a laugh (or even a smile). So without further ado, I unleash upon the internet my first comic!

Feel free to repost, pin, whatever, but please link it back to me.

A pile of broken dreams or a steel wrecking ball?

I came across an old bit of a post that I'd saved but never published. (remember, we aren't supposed to write about querying, despite the fact that it's one of the hardest things writers do, just after submissions, reading bad reviews, getting dropped by publisher and having agent leave the business).

Anyhow, what I found amazing was how much this feeling doesn't seem to change. Enough prologue, here's a clip from a bit of a distant post that's only now seeing the light of day.





I'm not gonna lie to you: my heart has been broken.

My dreams have been crushed.

I've seen what it looks like when everything I've dreamed has been burned down to the bitter ash. It ain't pretty.

But, as they say, Life goes on. Life doesn't care that your heart is shattered. Life doesn't care that you were broken. Life goes on, with or with out you.

And the frightening thing, is that all aspects of life go on. I got off the querying horse for a while. I needed a break, like for real. Sure, I have a ton of books just ready to hit go, but I needed to step away because sometimes publishing is crazy. Every book I've queried has broken my heart in some way or another, and now I'm back at that point where I'm trying to screw up my courage and do it again.

I'm back to reading agent bios and interviews, a pass time I'd sworn off. As I read, I find myself falling in love with them, my mind painting a picture of what my life would look like on the other side of finding the agent who will take me on.

I've been here before. I've stood on this shore and watched those waves come in. I always dream they'll be the waves to launch my boat, but instead, they eat away at the base of the cliff. It has always ended the same.

Like a fool, I find that there is still hope, and I wonder how? 

Where did you come from, hope? Did you not see how this ended last time? What about the time before? And the time before that? Why are you the one without reason, Hope? How did you survive the pyres on which I burned my last dream? How are you still alive, letting me fall in love again?

So, as you can see, I'm an idiot. My heart has taken leave of its senses and somehow--magically, for I had nothing to do with it--has reassembled itself to the point of feeling like an indestructible sphere of annihilation. 


But then I hesitate. This hurt last time. Am I ready to have this dream ground under the heel of a business model? Is my heart as indestructible as it pretends?

nope.

But it's too late, I've already jumped.

The current is faster than I remembered.

Sink or swim.

A to Z: Y

And we're all the way up to Y for You Can't Handle the Truth.

No really

The Silence that Kills Your Soul

Today I'm taking on yet another forbidden topic. This one is going to get me in trouble, but I'm talking about No Response Means No (or NRMN in my query tracking spreadsheet...tell me I'm not the only person who tracks that stuff and keeps stats).

IWSG: Rejections are good for you! (please don't shoot me)

Sweet Mother of the Internet, what happened to May? Swallowed in a vortex of Everything Else Going On, I’m sure, but I find it startling when whole months just disappear on me. But since it is a new month, and it’s Wednesday, that means it’s time to check in with Ninja Captain Alex and this month’s co-hosts C. Lee McKenzie, Tracy Jo, Melanie Schulz, and LG Keltner!

That’s right, it’s time for another Insecure Writer’s Support Group.

I’m feeling a little up right now, so I’m going to pass it along. This is probably going to sound like one of those afterschool specials about becoming who you are, and learning to ignore peer pressure. I just want everyone to know that I’m not always so upbeat. I’m not always so optimistic in the face of rejection, but today, I have some wisdom for you.

My very favorite fencing coach loved to quote Conan, Bruce Lee movies, and Monty Python. During class, he would ask one of the n00bs “How many lunges does it take to get it right?”

They would guess some crazy number around a thousand (it sounds round and the thought of doing ten thousand lunges when your thighs are screaming at you hurts too much to admit). He’d say “wrong!” then turn to one of the students indoctrinated in long nights of watching B movies on HBO and ask, “How many lunges does it take?”

“All of them, Maestro.”

Rejections are sort of like that. The idea behind “all the lunges” is that your body will be sculpted by each and every lunge, hopefully manifesting in a perfectly—or at least effectively—executed lunge in the heat of battle. Which is to say, each lunge brought you part of the way to where you are, incrementally closer to your goal. Rejections are like that too.

I came to a realization many years ago that a particular project I had wasn’t ready. I’d been querying the project. I LOVED the project, still do—in fact it’s next up on my edit list, long story, and I don’t mean word count—but in its early incarnation, it wasn’t ready. That wasn’t something I was able to see at the time.

For obvious reasons, that project got a lot of rejections. Those rejections helped me see my manuscript from someone else’s point of view. I grew.

Then I sent out more work, and I got more rejections. Many more rejections, but this one was different. I could feel the difference in the way I was being rejected, and more, after a little time away from it, I could feel how stilted and jumbled the manuscript was. (I also love that story, and may someday redo it in a way to make it publishable—I miss my motorcycle racing gryphons *sigh*).

I moved on to another book (sweet mother of science, there really is a trail of literary bodies in my wake!), and the rejections had changed again. These rejections made things sound fixable.

Fixable?

I’d abandoned projects before because I wasn’t sure what would make them better. I’d tried everything I knew how to do, and still they were flawed, somehow stuck in that place that lacked high concept AND compelling writing. Then my rejections moved to “I like this but…” That was a major breakthrough. I took the manuscript out and edited, revised, edited some more (you’ve heard how my process lacks those qualities of efficiency, yeah, this was like that).

That is to say, it took rejections—lots and lots of rejections—to put myself into a position to look at my manuscript with a more honed and professional eye. Sure, it still wasn’t the MS creating fans like the twihards, but all things in time (no, I'm not dreaming of that kind of fame, that's crazy with a capital K). And with each rejection, I gained something. Dare I say, I grew from them?

At that moment, I realized, I’d became a better writer because someone said no to me.

Mind blown.

When I was working on that first project, I cried a lot. I felt like I’d read a lot of really bad books that had been published. I felt like mine was “good enough.” I constantly said “If only someone would take a chance on my book and read it, they’d fall in love.” Or “My book is better than that published book by five-books-a-year Bestselling author.”All signs of beginner's angst.

But when no one said yes, I had to take a serious look at why. It wasn’t because I had enemies in the business. It wasn’t because people were judging me on my looks (at first I was very careful to not have pictures of me on the internet because of my work). So if they didn’t know me, and they weren’t just saying no cause I was, you know, fat (my default reason for most rejection in my life up untill that point) then why were they saying no?

Oh, right. They were saying no because the writing wasn’t that good.

So I dug deep, figured out some things and soldiered on.

Later when the rejections kept coming, I looked for other things in my craft: awkward writing, better word choice, the eradication of Just, Little, Pretty, and That. And each No drove me forward like my fencing coach yelling “Another!”. (Now I imagine him throwing a coffee cup to the ground a la Thor, but we never fenced on Thor’s days).

I’m not going to lie, rejection hurts, and even when it’s making you better, it still feels like you’re asymptotically* approaching your dreams. Even though it hurts, and even though it sucks to see a big field of no (especially when all around, you see the sea of yeses from people landing agents and book deals—or bypassing the whole system for selfpub and or kickstarter) rejections are a healthy part of the system.

A: if it were easy, everyone would do it.

B: If it were easy for you, you wouldn’t grow.

C: Okay, well, I don’t have a third piece of evidence because they hurt, and they suck, and I’ve cried over rejections, and not that pretty movie cry. Nope, that’s not my speed, deep ugly I can’t breathe crying, that's for me. But rejections change you. They mold you into the writer you will become. That’s usually better than the writer you are today. Go get some rejections! Wait, that didn't sound right. I suck at pep talks today.

And if this just makes you want to throw things at your computer, I get that feeling, too. Just remember that a shotgun to the screen, while beautiful to imagine, is actually quite messy (just imagine how I know that).

*An asymptote is a curve that approaches a particular line, but Never. Quite. Touches it. So yeah, sorry, math metaphors. It’s usually not contagious until I’m making vector jokes, but quite frankly, I'm all out of direction.

 

On subjectivity, contests, and personal taste

Let me start off by saying that I LOVE contests. I’ve met many of my very favorite writer buddies from participating in writing contests.

Second: writing contests give pretty much zero indication of how good your manuscript is, or how far along in your journey you are.

Last week was the big Writer’s Voice blog hop and team picks. A very exciting time for many writers, and I joined in. I went to Every. Single. Entry. And I made notes. I ranked them all as if I were playing agent (by the way, this is a very excellent way to get better at writing, read 150 queries and their corresponding first pages; some writing just zings). And then I watched—and cried!—as the Team Coaches went through and picked. (How did they miss those beautiful gems? Oh, my pretties, I wish all my yes picks had been picked by coaches!)

If you’ve ever wanted a lesson in subjectivity, do this. Read all the entries in a contest, and just pick out your favorites. You’ll be amazed. I picked out almost 20 yeses (as in, yes, I would definitely read on to the next page to see how this one went). I had a bunch of maybes, and a bunch of nos.

And then the coaches made their picks. Out of the 32 picks, only 8 of them were my yeses (leaving 12 of my pretty yeses—one with exclamation points!—riding pine with me). Of the 32 team members, 16 were maybes from me. And the remaining 8 were all Nos in my book.

As in, Nope, there was no way I’d be reading on. None.

The thing is, and this is important when it comes to writers querying agents, it’s not enough to write a story in the genre that the agent represents. The story also has to be something she (or he) would potentially love. I don’t know why, but stuffy sci fi stories that spend too much time being technical bore me (it’s the math, as soon as I’m doing derivatives in my head to figure out if the writer has a clue what he’s talking about, I’m just not in the story anymore). If I were an agent, and someone queried me with a FTL explanation story, I would probably reject it even if the writing were really spectacular—even though I really like science fiction. This is what people mean by personal tastes and subjectivity (also, I’ve read a bazillion FTL explanation stories, so it’d have to be super special).

When an agent is sending a rejection (or a contest host), it’s not a remark on your person or even your writing. I know, that part is hard. We all feel terrible when we get rejected, even when it’s something we legitimately didn’t want. Rejection hurts, but I’m trying to say that there might be more to being rejected than a bar you have to jump over.

The query trenches are a tough place, but it’s about so much more than just having a story in the represented genre that’s “good enough.” I know you guys are probably starting to wonder when I’ll pull out my crystals and do an aura cleansing (totally valid just not my thing), but I can honestly say, there’s no magic mark you have to make like with sports. In fencing, just get more touches than the other guy. In hockey, put the biscuit in the basket more often than the other team. But in writing, you have to hit that magic mark of making someone fall in love with your work and be in a marketable category (whatever that means today!).

So, to my fellows in the query trenches: chin up. You may be closer than you think. You may be farther than you’d hoped, but wherever you are, you are in it. Play the game, and know that what you learn now will be with you longer than your querying attempt. Good luck, and if you're feeling the sting of not making the cut for the Writer's Voice, just remember that 12 people are roaming around feeling sad today, but they had YES!!!! written in my book. It only takes one (from a publishing professional, I'm afraid I'm not very helpful there).  Query widely!

Step Number Five

I can’t remember where I read it, but someone wrote about the steps between querying and book deal. Here they are for the most part:

1. Silence 
 2. Form Rejection 
3. Page requests
4. Partial requests
5. Rejection with helpful feedback
6. Full request
7. Revise and resubmit
8. Representation offer
9. Editor Rejection
10. Editor Rejection with Feedback
11. Editor Revise and Resubmit
12. Book Deal

When I read the steps, I was just starting to query my first novel, and this list crushed my heart. The person who wrote the article said that you could skip steps, or get to step 7 with one book and only land at step 2 for the next. The article said you could skip right to step 6, or get stuck in the trap at step 5. It said you could bypass steps 1 through 8 and go right to small presses.

In writing people talk about coping with silence, form rejections, and even quite a few people talk about revise and resubmit (and boy howdy there are plenty of people who talk about representation, book deals and being on submission). I don’t see a lot of people talking about number five up there. I think this is probably because all the advice says to keep this stuff off your blog etc. etc.

I’m a rule breaker.

My first novel stalled out at page requests. I hoped my second novel would do better, and it did: partials! Yay! But still not representation.

I kept reading all the blogs that talked about querying their first novel and getting full requests and book deals in a couple of days. It made me feel defective. I kept ready blogs about the querying process, and they all said: pay attention to the personalized feedback you get; it’s golden. Except I’d never had personalized feedback. I thought it was a myth.

Until I got some. Buckets, actually. I got so much feedback I didn’t know what to do with it (none of it agreed).

If you’ve been here, I feel for you. All around me people congratulated me for moving up in the world. “Personalized feedback is a huge step!” they would say. Inside I felt like I’d burned all my bridges and ruined my chances by putting out substandard work (never mind that I’d polished and polished and polished that manuscript).

So if you’re in that boat: breathe deep. It’s hard. I don’t know if it ever gets easier to hear that you’re not there yet. Once the immediateness of failure began to fade, and I could try to figure out if I was going to try to fix my novel, I realized something: None of the feedback was in agreement. One agent said one thing, another something completely different.

What’s a girl to do?

If you find yourself in this situation, it’s really frustrating. You feel like you’re destroying your novel with every change, and if you don’t really understand what the feedback meant, it can really feel like you’re swimming through a murky pool of poo. So here’s what to keep in mind.

When someone says there’s a problem with your novel, they are correct. When they tell you that they know what it is, well, take that part with a grain of salt. People can see a problem a lot faster than they can actually see what that problem is.

So, if you’re sitting on some conflicting advice on what to fix, instead of thinking about how to fix everything mentioned in the feedback, look at style changes. Are you heavy on description? Light on description? Do you use lazy words to convey your action? At some point, you might find something in there you can fix. And it might just work to sort out your seemingly conflicting feedback.

So, if your feedback is “This is too fast,” followed by someone else saying “This is too slow” you know there’s something wrong with your pacing. It could be there’s someone out there for whom your novel will feel like the Goldilocks key (“Juuuuuuust right!”), but it’s also possible that your description is too thin to ground person one, and too lugubrious for person number two. The fix, make your description work for you, not just take up space on the page. That means agonizing over exactly which word to use in a sentence (no, it isn’t easy to do this, but it is essential).

Of course, that’s not going to work for everyone. And sometimes it really is just personal, but if you’re getting lots of feedback, it’s time to look at your writing and see if it really is your best (and really, there’s probably something you could clean up now that you’ve had your novel on the market for a little while).