Courting Rejection

I just mailed my revised version of The Search for Plupreme to ten children’s book publishers. I know, I know, they frown on multiple submissions, but the thought of successive submittals with three to four months between form letter rejections is more than I can bear.

An unpublished writer of children’s picture books is lucky to have a junior editor or summer intern, wading through the slush pile of thousands of unsolicited manuscripts, bother to even open, let alone read a few paragraphs of their work, so I seriously doubt anyone is going to care about my multiple submissions.

A writing instructor once told us, “Poems are never finished. Eventually you need to submit your latest version and move on to writing something else.”

Good advice. I have revised and rewritten and messed with the approximately 750 word Plupreme manuscript for so long, I was struggling to make it sound fresh and finding myself reintroducing flaws I had corrected months ago. So I sent the umpty-umpth revision on its merry way. As the form letter rejections come in, I will post them here, not out of a sense of defeatism, but as a mark of progress.

After all the discussion of great first lines, I confess that I remain dissatisfied with the first line to The Search for Plupreme:

Ashley finished her rainbow painting and smiled.

It’s not Kevin Henkes, but it’s serviceable. Time to heed the poet’s advice.

I’m not through with plucky little Ashley, however. Her second tale is well underway, and this time I hope to have the completed manuscript, tentatively titled, Ashley and Shadow, submitted in a few weeks.

Here’s the working first line:

“Who says you can’t teach an old dog new tricks?” Ashley’s father asked one night as he loaded the dishwasher.

Odds are it won’t even closely resemble that a week from now. Stay tuned.