In which someone is surprised

I sent a query letter to an agent at the beginning of 2008 then went to work on another project. I know you're supposed to query widely but I get easily confused and wanted to do one person at a time. A couple of months later I got a request for a partial, which turned into a request for a full, which I sent in August of 2008. Then nothing. I sent a couple of status checks, the first after six months I think, maybe the second after a year, and never got a response.

My boss who is a New York Times bestselling author, said that much time without an answer is a no and another agent said something similar. I was planning to query again, more widely, once things settle down a bit. I have enough anxiety over buying this house (did I mention we found mold on the ceiling yesterday when we took Chris to look at it?) and doing NaNoWriMo (still need 6000 words to finish) without adding the stress of querying.

Imagine my surprise when I got a response to my query. I really didn't expect anything after all this time. The agent said they were conflicted over my manuscript. They liked quite a lot of it but in the end weren't passionate enough about it to think they could do it justice. A very nice rejection and now I can move on without feeling vaguely guilty that there's still a full out there that someone might want.

Sometimes closure really is all it's cracked up to be.