About a year ago, I made the incredibly difficult decision to stop messing around with the novel I wrote as my MFA thesis and move on, at last. This came after years of writing and rewriting and submitting what I eventually admitted was a doomed manuscript—and the admission hurt. A lot.

My process for submitting the book had gone like this: I started by querying agents. I sent the first query on August 27^th, 2009, almost three years ago. I was mired in an agent hunt for a little over a year and a half, and during that time I queried exactly 61 agents. I received five manuscript requests and a handful of encouraging personal responses from agents whose submission process allows for the unsolicited submission of a partial manuscript. Of course, I mostly received form rejections, and sometimes, no response at all, but the personal responses I received were encouraging. I was told by several agents that the writing was really good, and some even said the story was compelling—they just didn’t fall in love with it.

By the end of my agent hunt, I had rewritten the manuscript several more times and had moved on to Plan B: entering the manuscript into contests. Money being tight, I entered the manuscript into only four contests before chucking the plan. I didn’t receive so much as an honorable mention in any of those contests, and having recently been through the contest process with Peter Never Came (the first contest I entered Peter Never Came into I won a semi-finalist slot; the third contest I entered I won first prize), I was pretty quickly disheartened and decided not to waste my money.

I had just begun to move on to Plan C, adding my manuscript to the ever growing slush piles of small presses, when I gave up. When I finally decided to move the manuscript to the “Failed Attempts” folder on my computer, I had submitted to only a handful of small presses—just the “big” small presses, if that oxy-moron doesn’t make your head want to explode. You know the ones I mean: the small presses who can afford the giant, luxurious, multi-table booths at AWP each year.

That was well over a year ago. I still haven’t heard back from all of them, though I’m certainly not holding my breath. But here’s the thing, here’s why I’m dredging this up again: I finally did get a response from one of  them—one of the “big” small presses, one of the biggest, without naming names—and the rejection . . . was incredibly encouraging. They said what a difficult decision it had been and that I should know that they really enjoyed the manuscript. They rejected it, yes, but their rejection left me unsure if I’d been too hasty to abandon the novel I’d worked so hard on.

And here I am again. Wondering. I can’t decide what the better route is: submit the manuscript to “small” small presses or stay the course, figuring whether the novel is publishable or not is beside the point because I need to move on with my life. But you know, even last year when I gave up, I still couldn’t bring myself to move the novel to my “Failed Attempts” file. It’s remained this whole time, unopened, in my “Novels” file. Part of me thinks it’s a waste to have a book that I believe is publishable just sitting there, collecting virtual dust.  But I don’t know, maybe I should leave the file exactly where it is now, in a sort of limbo, not given up on, exactly, but no longer making the rounds, either.