I'm upping the rejection ante by making a concerted effort to get more of my writing in front of people. As I write this, I have another McSweeney's Internet Tendency submission and a second literary agent query both hanging in the balance.
I'm pretty confident about the McSweeney's submission because I like the premise; it hits the quirkiness criteria that I think they have over there. This one went through more revisions than I usual, so I hope it retains the original spirit I started with. If this one makes the cut, I'll feel I've cracked their humor algorithm. If not, it's back to the white board, and I'm fresh out of pens.
As for the literary agent query, the odds say I haven't a shot. How many rejections does the average novel go through before finding a home: 50+? Still, there's no reason why this cat isn't the one who takes a chance on an up and coming writer with a kick-ass debut novel.
Regardless of what happens, the nice part about having more than one iron in the fire is that you don't dwell on them like you do with there's one and only. So, I'm letting the chips fall where they may, and just to be on the safe side, I think I'll research more literary agents before calling it a day.