Somebody replied to a post of mine this week with a line that’s been sitting in my chest since: “You already know what to do, you’re just negotiating with comfort.” I wrote back something clever about how the negotiation always ends the same way — comfort doesn’t argue, it just waits you out. Then I sat with it for a day and realized I wasn’t just replying to a stranger. I was describing myself.
Here’s my version of the negotiation. I tell myself I’m “still building momentum” on the platform side before I fully commit to querying agents. That sounds responsible. It sounds like strategy. What it is, most days, is a very well-dressed excuse for staying in the part of this process where nobody can reject me yet.
Querying is the part where the manuscript stops being mine alone and starts being something other people get to have opinions about. Right now, in the building phase, I control the whole story. I decide what a good day looks like. I decide when something’s “ready.” The second I query, I hand a piece of that control to strangers whose job is partly to say no. That’s not a small thing to give up, and I think some part of me has been quietly stretching out the runway because the runway is the safest place to stand.
Comfort doesn’t show up as laziness. That’s the trick of it. It shows up wearing a to-do list. Another essay to write. Another week of platform-building. Another metric to hit before I’m “really ready.” All of it defensible. All of it, if I’m honest, also a way to keep the actual scary thing one week further away, indefinitely.
I don’t think the fix is forcing the querying date forward out of guilt. Rushing it because I feel bad about stalling would just be a different version of not trusting the process. But I do think the fix starts with calling it what it is instead of what it sounds like. Not “I’m building strategically.” Just: I’m scared of the no, and I’ve found a productive-looking way to postpone hearing it.
Comfort doesn’t need you to admit that out loud. It’s happy to let you call it strategy forever. But once you see the negotiation for what it is, it gets a lot harder to keep taking the deal.
-ABB