Welcome back, literary world. Hope you all had a great holiday break. I got some much-needed rest and time away from the work world, and am ready to dig in over here. 

I thought I'd start my year of blog posts off with a resolution I'm going to hold myself to in 2010.

This year I am reaffirming that I will only sign projects that I get a warm tingly feeling about. The ones where I start reading, and go "Oh my goodness, I think I have something."

If you're somewhat startled by my saying this ("What? You weren't already doing that?" Current clients, rest easy...) just think about it this way: will you date just anybody? Have you ever dated someone because they were just the best you could do at the time but you knew the chemistry was off? 

That's what I thought.

Sometimes the well of slush runs dry. Not in a literal sense. It never ends. But sometimes you get a string of either disappointing queries, or just things that don't speak to you. And sometimes you request something that looks kind of good, and you read it, and you think, "Well, this is better than everything else I've seen lately" or worse, "Yeah, I suppose I can sell this." 

Because, guess what. Just because it's better than what you've been seeing doesn't mean it's the right one for you. And then your heart isn't really in it. And then if it doesn't sell, you have a disappointed author, and maybe your motivation faded.

And so I only want to sign projects that make me giddy. Things I want to tell EVERYONE about. Things I will want to stick out for the long-haul with. No tingly feeling, no sale.

Which leads me to my next point: there can only be so many of those projects. What's that line from THE INCREDIBLES? "If everyone's special, no one is..."?

So, please. Don't take it too personally if yours isn't the right one for me. You will be right for someone else. And you don't want someone who's only kind of into you anyway. Wouldn't it make you die a little bit on the inside if someone was just settling for you? You can do better. (I tell myself this a lot when dating also.)

Bring it on, 2010. Make me fall in love. I won't settle for less.

~Elana