Not Good Enough

A few weeks ago, I managed to get a real live literary agent to look at my manuscript-in-progress. The agent e-mailed me back yesterday and told me she didn’t find the material “compelling.” I wasn’t terribly shocked or dismayed. The book is only half-complete and still needs a lot of polishing. And maybe the story is the kind of thing that won’t grab everyone’s interest. I won’t have a good sense of that until I show it to a few more people. But my gut sense is that it’s interesting enough to keep writing, and so I will. I’ll keep everyone posted on the many, many rejections that are still to come.
My sister is back from Europe and is staying with me for a few days. She brought me a tres chic black T-shirt from the Cannes Film Festival and a few other trinkets. I was asking about accessibility in Paris. She said that the only accessible Metro station was at St. Michel in the Latin Quarter. The rest have stairs and apparently many have a distinct odor of “bum piss.” Her words, not mine. She also said she only saw a handful of people with visible disabilities on the streets of Paris. Does anyone know if the EU has a department that deals with disability issues? Just curious. I suppose I can look myself. I’d be interested in seeing what sort of disability-related statistics are being collected over there in terms of population, household income, and so forth.