u/Little-Occasion-7748

I Spent fourteen months querying. Sent to sixty one agents. Got back forty three rejections, eleven non responses, and seven requests for fulls that ultimately did not go anywhere. Kept a spreadsheet, stayed organized, tried to treat it professionally. Did not feel professional. Felt like repeatedly walking up to a door and having it close in my face before I could finish knocking.

By month eleven I had started seriously researching self publishing. Not because I believed it was the wrong choice but because I needed to feel like I had a path forward that did not depend on someone else saying yes. Came very close to pulling the trigger just to end the waiting.

What stopped me was not patience or faith in the process. It was a single email from an agent who passed but included two paragraphs of actual feedback. She liked the voice, found the structure of the middle act confusing in a specific way she described precisely, and suggested the opening was doing too much too fast.

Spent three months on a revision I had not planned to do, kept every version of the manuscript in something called Skrib Writing so I could see exactly what had changed between the version that got forty three rejections and the version that got the offer, and that comparison was one of the more honest things I have ever looked at about my own writing. Sent to twelve more agents with the revised pages.

Got an offer on the fourth submission of that new batch.

The revision the rejection made possible was what the book needed and I would not have done it if I had stopped querying when I wanted to.

The door closing repeatedly was not the end of the story. It was just the part before the part that mattered.

I don't even know where to start with this one honestly. My husband gave his mom a spare key like two years ago before we even had a real conversation about boundaries because back then she was helping us move furniture and it made sense at the time. Fast forward to now and I keep coming home to little things being different. A candle moved. My laundry folded a way I didn't fold it. Once I came home and there was a whole pot of food on the stove that I didn't make. At first I thought maybe I was losing my mind but then I actually caught her leaving one afternoon when I came back early from work and she just said oh I let myself in to drop something off, like it was the most normal thing in the world.

I brought it up to my husband and he kind of laughed it off and said that's just how his mom is, she's always been like that with family, it's a love language type thing. But it doesn't feel like love to me, it feels like I have no actual privacy in my own home. I work from home some days and the thought that she could just walk in whenever she feels like it makes me anxious in a way I can't really explain to him without him getting defensive.

I don't want to demand the key back because I know it'll turn into this whole thing where I'm the bad guy who doesn't want family around, and his mom has a way of making everything sound like I'm the one causing problems. But I also can't keep living like this where I'm never sure if I'm actually alone in my own apartment. Has anyone dealt with something like this and figured out how to handle it without it becoming a huge fight. I just want to feel normal in my own space again.

If you want, I can also draft a couple of in-character OP replies to comments once people start responding, in the same conversational tone.