Is Pitching a Novel All That Different From Shark Tank?

One recent morning, looking for a distraction, I devoted myself to the spreadsheet where I track my fiction submissions. I added some new literary magazines and deleted the defunct ones. I updated submissions windows and word counts. I categorized the nice rejections I’d received: the generic (We enjoyed this), the semi-personalized (This one made it to our final round), and, finally, the ones that included a specific critique—which at least served as evidence that some human somewhere had read what I’d written. The spreadsheet, which always bums me out the longer I spend time with it, would help me determine where to send my latest short story, the first one I’d finished in months. But by the time that I was done—having spent all this time laying out plans for placing this new story somewhere—it was suddenly lunch, and I hadn’t done any actual writing. When I’m in the spreadsheet, I forget what I originally set out to do: I find myself believing that my ultimate goal is to publish, when I know the real goal is simply to write something good.