I had some exalted hopes for my novel [ACROSS THE BRIDGE OF STRAW & FOG] especially after uber-agent Sandy Dijkstra called me up late one night to tell me how much she loved and was intoxicated by the writing, but barely four months after she’d signed me, she e-mailed to say that she’d lost confidence in my book – she’d liked each revision a bit less than the last, she confided, and anyway after rejections by seven major editors, including her friend Jonathan Galassi, she no longer thought the manuscript could sell. In industry parlance, my novel was “burned.” Time to part ways. "Helas!" she wrote in conclusion.
I knew that no other agent would touch a book that had already been rejected by the seven top editors in New York (even if one editor, Julia Serebrinsky at Ecco, had described it as “one of the best first novels I’ve read in a long time”). My book had failed. In two years of work I had given birth to nothing, to less than nothing. Walking the empty Cambridge streets by night I recalled having felt the same sick this-race-is-run sensation before. Like revisiting the old school stadium where your team lost every game they ever played, though not for lack of hope or effort.
