One of my friends has disagreed with my theory on confident people. It was bound to happen. I even said I wasn’t sure my theory had any merit.

She said: 

“…your theory was very interesting, though I don’t think it’s completely true. I know many people who are very confident but are also mean to others. Then again, they are teenagers, and who knows what they will be like when they grow up!”

It’s interesting to note that those teenagers who are confident are so young. Maybe they’re not done yet. They haven’t gotten to the point where they’ve suffered some knocks. It happens usually in the thirties, when attractive women who formerly got wolf whistles and cat calls, don’t get them any more because they start looking their age.

Remember that actress I dealt with used to be more confident too. Practically impervious, when she was younger. And the later time I met her she had aged, there were fine lines around her mouth and nose, she had a slightly more haggard look and now she was suffering anxiety attacks.

Those people who are young teenagers, confident and cruel, perhaps they are those who have had mostly success-only journeys. They may continue to have nothing but what they believe is success and they may continue in their cruelty.

And some of them, might be sociopaths, incapable of feeling shame. For them confidence is a natural state. Apparently it is estimated about one percent of the population are sociopaths. That’s a LOT of people!

I know quite a bit about sociopaths right now. In my current novel the villain is a sociopath, and part of doing my research for the book involved going to several websites about them. What was interesting was to read all a hundred or so of the comments. They were fascinating. Some of them were written by self-confessed sociopaths. And all of those exuded an incredible amount of confidence.

 Which is actually their weakness I think. In fact it’s my villain’s weakness. He’s so sure that his victim will behave in terms of self-preservation that he fatally underestimates him.

And even writing this, right now, I think the concept is brilliant. And I think the way I executed the concept was exceptional. I resisted the urge to sensationalize it.

It was interesting that this topic came up. When I wrote that blog post about confidence, I wrote it at a time when my own confidence was high! Like I said, it ebbs and flows, but now I’ve had a bit of a setback.

Nothing really, just a rejection from an agent I was hoping would represent me. Maybe the fact that I hadn’t sensationalized the book, when I could have, was what turned him off. I don’t know. I’m grasping.

I’d written a pretty darn good query email last Saturday, not thinking I’d hear from him for a while because he’s very popular. Monday afternoon I received a reply asking for the first thirty pages. They weren’t even ready yet! I had meant to go over them one more time polishing. So I hurried up, polished them and sent them off on Tuesday and got a reply the next day saying he couldn’t connect with the main character the way he’d have liked and although I was definitely a talented writer (his words) he didn’t think he could do justice in representing me.

It was a nice professional rejection of this manuscript that I do think is really that good.

Of course it stung. I had built up hopes. It’s inevitable.

And it shook my faith in the book, at least for a little while. But doggedly I went back to it, to polish up the rest of it, and reading through, there’s a quiet voice in me that insists that this book is really good.

Wouldn’t it be funny if it turns out to be one of those life altering types of books, yeah right!

I’ll be happy if it just sells, and finds a readership.

Darn it, I, like it! Even if that agent didn’t connect.

For most people, life is not a success only journey.

Yes, rejection hurts, but I remind myself that it’s all part of God’s plan, the ‘Qadr’ of Allah.

I keep remembering that hadith of Abu Sufyan where he was talking to the emperor Heraclius in Jerusalem. Among the questions Heraclius asked Abu Sufyan was whether the Prophet (peace be upon him) suffered defeats at times, and Abu Sufyan said yes, he wins some battles and he loses some. So even the Prophet (peace be upon him) had his ‘rejections’, so I ask myself why should I expect to have a success only journey? There’s no such thing.

 And in fact the rejections can make you work all the harder, they can make you steel your resolve. In this case, I’ve come to the conclusion that this will probably not be a popular book. But it’s still a good book, in fact it may be an excellent book, masha Allah.

I believe this book has merit and should be published. I may just have to look harder for a publisher.