It’s true that I never thought I’d write a love story. The mechanics of romance just never interested me in quite the same way that dissection or cage-fighting did. It’s not that I’m a huge pragmatist, or even very morbid. It’s just that as a teenager, I viewed relationships as a recreational indulgence. And, admittedly, I prided myself on being far more cynical than I actually was. But now, I’m writing this YA romance (bizarre, right?) and I can’t stop thinking about it, because the implications are just so fascinating.

I’m coming to believe that while the adult heart is complicated in its functions, it’s essentially an orderly structure. Like a textbook diagram, it illustrates basic principles, and though its complexity may be daunting, I suspect that some people do become experts, surgical masks at the ready, scalpels in hand.

The adolescent heart is different. It seems to more closely resemble a piece of religious iconography. Structurally, the design is simple. No chambers, no valves or aortas, just a chunk of muscle the size of your fist. Often on fire, it mystifies the scientific mind. Bristling with arrows and unidentified protrusions, it bleeds on a regular basis. Sometimes, it’s wreathed in thorns.

I don’t pretend to understand the actual physics of the flaming heart. At 15, I figured out that sharing infatuations was a way of socializing—that the answers you gave didn’t matter. It was simply about the act of conspiring. When other girls asked for confessions, I deflected. I had a smile that pleaded sincerity. It said, I am a forthright, honest girl who is telling you everything. Once, for roughly eight months, I let everyone around me believe that I was very taken with the star of the debate team, because that somehow seemed preferable to revealing the boy I was actually interested in. I realize this is strange behavior, but I was not the kind of girl who named names, and I’m beginning to think that’s not unusual.

There’s the other kind of teenager, of course; the 17-year-old who declares passionate and undying love, gazing raptly on bent knee, and then declares it again two months later to someone else. One of my best friends was the declaration-type, desperate over the captain of the soccer team one week, and preferring the drummer in jazz-band the next. We strategized together, planning conversations and chance meetings, and it was entertaining and satisfying. She liked the conquest. I liked the logistics, the tactical reconnaissance, but mostly I liked how safe it was to borrow someone else’s infatuation. I was the lieutenant with the clipboard and the diagrams—high involvement and low risk.

So, now I’m starting to admit that this is interesting to me—high school romance—the pursuit, but more importantly, the delicate cultivation of subterfuge and denial. When I was 17, one of my favorite words was obfuscation. I’ve always been interested in the keeping of secrets.

The story itself is messier and meaner than it first appeared, and becoming more complicated by the second. But maybe that’s just what happens when your starting question is a simple one:

What would you do if you could do anything you wanted and there was no risk involved? And then, what if it turned out that there was?

Over at the League of Reluctant Adults, mdhenry held a trivia contest awhile back. It was ostensibly to celebrate the release of his first novel, Happy Hour of the Damned and—I suspect—also because he likes zombies. The prize was a rubber duck of the zombie-devil persuasion and I thought to myself I like bathing, and more importantly, when it comes to zombie trivia, I have a depth and breadth that is unrivaled by any girl I’ve met.

So, because there’s nothing like feeling special over knowing pop-culture minutia that no one in their right mind would bother to retain, I was compelled to show off my Skillz. As a result, I recently received this unassailably cool duck in the mail.

Its brain is showing. Tell me that’s not cool. Plus, it glows in the dark.

Needless to say, I was extremely pleased with the duck, and have been leaving it around for house-guests to stumble upon, but the real windfall was this:

It’s a known fact that I’m a sucker for the undead. But, and here I reveal the true depths of my nerdiness, I’m an even bigger sucker for footnotes. The. Book. Has footnotes.

If you’re bothered by copious amounts of bodily fluids, I can’t in good conscience recommend it. If, like me, you are not bothered by copious amounts of bodily fluids and you like your protagonists with great shoes and a taste for human flesh, maybe just don’t read it at the gym, because then the woman on the adjacent stationary bike will ask you what’s so funny and you will be forced to:

A) tell her
B) make up something completely unconvincing, but wholesome
C) tell her in a euphemistic, round-about way that actually, when you think about it, sort of makes a ménage-à-quatre-turned-bloodbath in a cheap motel sound even worse

Because I’m a remarkably bad liar and also find it expedient to avoid using the phrase gang-bang in conversation with strangers, I picked C. Saying that it could have gone better is being generous. The situation is, of course, compounded by the fact that Happy Hour has a pretty innocuous cover. It would not look out of place on the sassy beach-read shelf, but don’t be fooled. It’s not chick-lit, but if it was . . . well, basically, I’d read a lot more chick-lit.

This is not a post about defeat and I certainly don’t mean it to sound like recreational angsting. I’m actually a very optimistic person, but at the moment, I’m also feeling surreal and a little disappointed—although preemptively.

Back at the end of September, I queried my first-ever real/live novel. It occurs to me now that I never got around to posting the quick-and-dirty about that, so these are my stats.

• Queries sent: 14
• Rejections of query with no comment: 3
• Rejection with suggestion to query mega-agent: 1 (this comes back later)
• Requests for more material (array of fulls and partials): 6
• Non-responders: 4
• Offers of representation: 0

I realize that there are many people who might look at these numbers and be scandalized that I only sent out 14 queries, particularly since my hit rate was very good. However, and I’ve said this before, the feedback I’ve gotten has been consistent. There is agent-consensus. I am the author of what is essentially a flawed manuscript, which is fine, since it was also a first manuscript. Honestly, I’m pretty proud that the book isn’t awful, as that tends to be an occupational hazard of first manuscripts. Upshot=I promise that in the future, I can do way better.

However, on the topic of the mega-agent:

In my mind, this woman is basically the pinnacle as far as literary agents go, but I was way too scared to query her, because she is Impressive. So, instead, I queried someone else at the same agency—younger, hungrier, building his list, you know the drill. He was very courteous and wrote saying that while he didn’t think the project was right for him, I should query his colleague (big, fancy agent) because it sounded like the type of thing she might be interested in.

Until yesterday, I counted her as a non-responder (you’ll remember, all this was happening back in September). But yesterday, she requested a partial. Here’s where the defeat-part comes in. Six months ago, it would have meant everything to get a request from this agent. Now, what it comes down to is, I don’t have a lot of faith in the project. I’m at a loss regarding how to fix the thing on a structural level, although over the past few months, I’ve taken several runs at making it less ugly. I wish I had something really knock-out. It seems like such a waste to get a request from from one of my most-coveted agents for something I don’t feel is strictly viable, but there’s nothing to be done.

Defeat time is over now. I sent it anyway.