If you’ve attempted to sell your writing either to an agent or through an agent to a publisher you know that a significant part of your energy is spent in the waiting.

Waiting is excruciating. It is a knot at the pit of your stomach that won’t go away. The hope, the anticipation you feel every time you check your email. The tiny skip your heart makes each time your phone tells you there’s a new text message.

I hate the waiting.

One would think that, understanding that the process can take weeks and weeks, you could forget for a few moments that you’re waiting for something important.  And you do forget, or simply disremember now and then for brief moments at least. But then with a lurch, you remember what you’re waiting for, what a nod or a rejection could mean and the knot comes back, the heart skips and the eagerness to know what will happen next feels as if it will destroy you.

It’s far worse than waiting for Christmas, or a vacation or some other highly anticipated event. These events you know without doubt will happen.  Christmas will come. There will be gifts, and good food and a tree, friends and family. Vacation will eventually arrive at its designated time.

In the publishing process, you know that eventually you will hear something but you have no idea what form it will take.  A yes, a no. A short, formula rejection sent to hundreds of others just like you who waited with hope only to have their dreams dashed. Or a longer, nicer, detailed rejection that spells out all of the work’s flaws.

It could be a yes. People have received them. We dream about the yes.

In the waiting, we just want it to be something, one or the other, but something damn soon or you’re going to go crazy.

Chances are, if you’ve ever allowed friends or family to read your fiction, they’ve wondered if one of your characters were based on them.

I sent a close friend a copy of my novel and she immediately assumed the person who was murdered—described as a relatively empty headed, annoying person—was herself. I had based the murder victim on someone I knew, but it wasn’t my close friend and I was surprised that she would see herself in the character.

I’ve also had family members ask me, “When did that happen to you?” Of course, the event may have loosely happened to me or to someone I knew, but I’m always shocked that people, knowing they’re reading a novel, assume that I’m writing a journal rather then a complete work of fiction.

One of the novels I’m working on is about three sisters, murder and an abusive father. I have two sisters who I know will assume the characters are all about them. My father, who will never read the book unless and until it’s published, will without a doubt, assume the story is all about him. He will be furious. He will also be wrong.

Part of my enjoyment in writing is to create things that I haven’t seen, to shape a world that I can control and to meet people I don’t know. I take a little bit of this, a little bit of that and mix it together to hopefully create something enjoyable to read. Parts of me, parts of my friends, parts of the truth and parts of what never would or could happen. I use it all.

And if anyone did ask me, “Is that character me?” and it was-- I’d quickly and easily lie.