Waiting (My Writing Journey, Part 8)

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As you will recall, my goal was to submit my novel to the Operation First Novel contest put on by the Christian Writer's Guild. This was the first one they did several years ago. What the contest gave me was a deadline. I don't know about you, but it's harder to write without one.

So . . . I sent it in. And waited. You know? That's probably the hardest part about this writing journey.

Waiting. It's not an easy thing. But if you want to be a writer, you better get used to it! I've learned a whole lot about patience waiting for editors to respond to my submissions. :)

To make this arm of my journey shorter I'll summarize. I obviously didn't win the contest. The top 10 submissions were to go to editorial board at Tyndale House, personally read by Jerry Jenkins. I made it to the top 20, which was a huge boost to my writing self-esteem but not enough to go to the board.

I didn't mind. In fact, I had a real peace about it as I know that's not what God had for me at that time. But I immediately jumped right into the submitting-my-manuscript-to-editors stage. At this point my book was only 67K in length, too. Not long enough. But we'll get to that in a future post.

Where are you in your writing journey? What have you learned?