Thank You, Durham Arts Council!

I'm particularly good at identifying the things I need to work on - including my personal and professional anxiety and often dysfunctional responses. Unfortunately, I'm not particularly good at addressing these things constructively. I am in the early stages of finding an agent for my next children's book, One Proud Black Cat (OPBC), and I'm already feeling the pangs of rejection emails I haven't even received yet. Over the years, my family has not been particularly supportive of my writing, so I pretty much celebrated past victories (I've published 4 children's books) alone and with the feeling that I should be accomplishing more. Eventually I stopped submitting and concentrated on my immediate life, because it was more rewarding.

Well, two kids are now in college, my husband is 100% home-based, and I am finally crawling out of my cocoon and submitting another project, determined to learn from past experience and do things full-tilt this time.

Several months ago, I reluctantly prepared an application for the Durham Arts Council's Artist Support grant to fund the professional redesign of my website and blog. I knew I wasn't their typical applicant (visual and performing arts) and that I was unlikely to be awarded the coveted funds (I'd applied for and failed to receive similar grants in the past).

I laid all my thoughts bare in that application, which, though I took care that my wording should not offend anyone, made me think even more I wasn't going to get it.

I was visibly shaken when, a few weeks ago, I received a congratulatory email informing me that I was a grant recipient. This act of affirmation has jump started me, exactly as I wrote in the grant that it would. It had been a long time since I'd sent out a "message in a bottle" (application, query letter, etc.); I had forgotten the meaning and direction that simple act, alone, adds to the passage of time.

It is very important to me that the web designer I hire is Durham-based (my hometown), and locating someone in my price range (shoot, locating anyone at all) has been difficult. But thanks to my neighborhood list serve, which put me in touch with someone out of my price range, who made a couple calls and referred me to someone who may be in my price range, I am meeting with a talented Durham-based web designer tonight to discuss things extensively.

So I've been comparing my home-made webpage - written using FrontPage 1998 (!) - to my favorite children's authors' websites and worrying that I'm going to need more than the grant money to do what I want to do.

I've also been working on my top-choice agent query letter for the last month (yes, month). Query letters are generally more important than the actual submission (which may explain a good deal of what's on the shelves), and I get anxious just at the *thought* of writing them.

Plus, agents can require exclusive review periods of 4 weeks or more just to let you know they aren't interested. (Most try not to do this, but they can get thousands of query correspondences in a single day.) How's a writer supposed to get their stuff out there in a timely manner?

I need to go to a writing conference and meet some agents in person, in which case I also need to make time stand still. Or be patient for the time to come of its own accord, even if that takes years.

See how my head spins?

"It's all good; it's all good," the voice in my head keeps saying. And it is, thank Goodness.

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