Denied.

Yes, unfortunately it's true.

The odds are against you when you aspire to being a novelist. It's a highly competitive, subjective environment. Without agent representation, your odds are even less of being successful.

For these reasons, you need to expect some degree of failure. Nevertheless, it's never fun to hear you need to try again.

I got some positive feedback from my agent contact for 'Stay of Extinction', but it needs 'extensive work'. I'm not sure what that means, other than it will require much more effort to polish than my prospective agent could spend.

Where to from here? Well, back to the drawing board. Time to fix the typos, tie up the loose ends, and iron out the inconsistencies. Then we start the query process again.

Am I bummed? Majorly. Will that make me quit? Absolutely not. Like baseball, it's a long season.
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The email I received:

<snip>
At any rate, I finished Stay of Extinction. I thought about it quite a bit - and though I really enjoyed it, I don't know if it's something that I feel I can accept at this point. I would love to work with you on it, but I feel it needs extensive work, which is not something I have time to do right now. What I would recommend, is that you look for other representation, and keep up correspondence with me in the meantime - if you'd like - and let me know how it's going. If I should have a break in my schedule, I'd be happy to work on it with you as I think you're a wonderful writer and the idea is sound.
</snip>