Step 8: Shake It Off

I promised myself when I created this blog that it would be okay to write about some of my honest feelings and hardships. That this isn't Facebook, where people only want to see happy things and cat gifs. No one I know even reads this blog, so it's all right to let your hair down once in a while and throw yourself a pity party. With that in mind, I'm breaking out the party hats.

This about sums it up.

Apparently, there was a little thing happening on Twitter yesterday that involved a bunch of book editors and agents combing the #DVpit hashtag and liking and retweeting their favorites pitches. It was an event aimed directly at authors of novels revolving around diversity and underrepresented voices, which is absolutely what Defining Lines is about. Basically, it was an opportunity to solicit my idea to 50+ dream editors and agents in one sitting.

When did I find out about this little event? Oh, about twenty minutes after it ended.

[SCREAMS INTERNALLY]

Actually, that's a lie. I saw some posts about it when I was making my morning rounds at the Absolute Write Water Cooler, which is a forum for writers that I frequent. I'm still kind of a n00b when it comes to literary culture and lingo, and when I spotted mentions for 'DVpit', I assumed it was some weird acronym or phrase I wasn't familiar with. It popped up several more times over the course of the day, and I finally did a Google search for it at 5:23pm, which was around the time that the agent who had organized the event ended the Twitter session.

It's cool. I'm just going to go over here and dry heave into a paper bag.

It's obviously not the end of the world, and on the plus side, I got the names of 50 agents I can query individually if I want to. It's just that, it's so like me to miss out on something as awesome as that. I feel like my whole existence can be summed up as the girl who is a half-hour late to everything. I know everyone has the same desire of wanting to be recognized for their talents, and unfortunately there's simply too many people living on this planet for it to happen to every single person, but damn if it isn't the most heart-wrenching feeling in the world to have so many missed moments on account of my being entirely unaware of my surroundings. While I sit at my keyboard, refreshing my mailbox and cleaning up my spam filter, other people's dreams are coming to fruition because they were in the right place at the right time.

Curse my introverted nature!