I have'nt given up on help arriving, just yet

Yesterday I sent the full manuscript of my first novel to an editor for a look-see. I’ve made those pages into as proper a book as I can make it without professional/divine intervention. The editor asked me to list some of the agents I have already queried. (She said my query sucked. Her words not mine but the same meaning.) I was at a loss to recall who I have queried over the past seven years, so I went into my ‘sent’ file (on this computer, I have two others as boat moorings stored in the attic) and started to list the names.

When I got to twenty-five agent names I started to cry. Some of them I queried twice and one agent, a true gentleman allowed me three chances. All the hopes and dreams regarding that book, all the ups and downs of clicking send and checking emails came back. When the list reached in the high thirties I became embarrassed. Admitting that my query produced no requests for fulls and only a few partials was beyond heartbreaking. The partials, which garnered no further requests, at least got me to re-write, not just edit, the opening pages well over a dozen times. Only a few members of my writing group have read the entire book.

One of the members of our group is a college level creative writing teacher; she loved the book and said it was “the one.” My first reader, a very astute non-smoke-blowing truth teller also loves the book. I have clung to those opinions as if I am splayed across the bottom of a flipped boat in the middle of the north Atlantic. It’s cold and rough out here, and lonely. I have been waiting on the bottom so long that I fear all my paddling has been for nothing. All my efforts for fiction survival hinge on one set of eyes to spot me floating in this see of  saline.

I haven't just been waiting. I've worked hard on other stuff and achieved a modicum of small successes elsewhere, but that book, "the one" is my ship.

Is that a rescue helicopter on the horizon or is it someone throwing stones?

I am adrift. Where are you?