14 posts tagged “rejection”

Failure is inevitable... Show us some failure.
Submitted by Connie.

The funny thing about failure: it's usually indistinguishable from success until the last possible moment.  All those sports success stories--just a heartbeat away from failure.  It's the cruel thing about failure, too.  You're ready to succeed, right up until the moment you're staring failure in the face.  Writing is no different.  There's every chance someone will want to publish your story/buy your book/offer you representation/give you an award, right up until they don't.  As proof, I offer my current submission roster, as tracked on Duotrope.com.

Failure_success

Some days it's hard to stare that list down, and not necessarily because of the "Rejection, Form" entries.  Often the "Pending Response" listings are harder to take.  Success or failure waiting to happen.

Sometimes you get a rejection that makes you erase the play board and start over. 

I drank too much coffee yesterday and was awake too late, thereby putting myself at risk of the dreaded unexpected late-night e-mail rejection.  It was one of those rejections that's hard to set aside, because it was personalized and it came from a place I'm already familiar with: obvious writing talent and not a commercially viable project.

I know this about the book I've been querying.  It's too big, too convoluted, a bit too smart to be straight genre, but I love the book.  I want people to read the book, but I'm not without a certain amount of pragmatism.  After eleven rejections, knowing what I know, I'm putting this one on indefinite hiatus.  It's time to move on.

The next book I'm querying is distinctly more commercial, so at least I don't have that hurdle, but that whole issue is weighing on me pretty heavily as I try to decide what project to work on next.  I always have about half a dozen things waiting in the wings, but as I work on a decision, I thought I'd ask my Voxy neighbors what kind of things you're interested in reading these days.  What sorts of stories, issues, people are you interested in?

Burn_baby_burn

Cortez is reported to have burned his ships in order to destroy in the minds of his crew the possibility of retreat.  (Historians still debate whether he burned them, scuttled them, or simply ran them aground.)  Whether he did or didn't, Cortez didn't invent the idea of burning your ships.  In the 3rd Century BC, Chinese general Xiang Yu burned his ships at the River Yangtze.  He took it one step further.  He destroyed his troops' cooking pots, as well, as a motivator for conquering their enemies.  There was no way back and they had to win to survive.  You might expect mutiny after something like that, but Xiang's ploy worked.

A professor in behavioral economics at MIT recently conducted an experiment in decision-making that mirrors the aspect of burning ships.  Participants in the experiment played a video game in which they could earn real money by being willing to destroy other opportunities for earning money.  The problem was that most participants in the study couldn't bring themselves to destroy those opportunities, even if it diminished their returns.  They couldn't burn their ships.

What does that have to do with writing?  Today I'm convinced it has quite a lot to do with writing.  Yesterday, in keeping with the theme of the week, I received another rejection on a short story.  Looking at the rejection, however, I didn't feel my usual set of frustration and sadness.  Instead, I had a little epiphany.  The story, honestly, wasn't one of my better ones, but I'd gone on putting the energy into submitting it, because I couldn't let it go.  It was downright silly to waste any more time on it, when I didn't think it was that good.  I just had some sort of sentimental attachment to it, because I wrote it.  So, I simply pulled it off my submission roster.  I felt better immediately and I can put that energy into preparing to submit a different story.

At the risk of sounding like I believe in this sort of thing, I'll note that shortly after I made that decision, I got an acceptance for another story in the mail.  I don't believe the two are related, but I do believe that sometimes you have to burn a manuscript to move forward.

It's already been that kind of week.  I got my annual review yesterday and my boss gave me "exceptional" marks on all categories.  That's me: Redzilla the Exceptional Secretary. 

I am not currently Redzilla the Exceptional Writer, because along with my exceptional marks as a secretary, I got three (3) rejections yesterday.  I'll return when I feel more like an Exceptional Blogger.

After several weeks rejection-free, I fell off the wagon.  Two rejections awaited me at home this evening.  With an ice storm coming, though, there wasn't a lot of time to linger around moping.

I scurried off to the grocery store to pick up some essentials in case I can't get out tomorrow and in case I lose power.  The best part is seeing what other people think of as pre-storm essentials.  I picked up the truly essential: cat litter, cereal and milk.  If nothing else, I figure I don't have to cook cereal and I'm not going to have any trouble keeping the milk cold, even without electricity.

The family in line in front of me was buying: a case of Coke, a case of beer (got the fluids squared away), a bag of charcoal (in case you need to start a fire to cook), oh, and about a dozen frozen pizzas.  Standing in line, I kept trying to visualize what cooking a frozen pizza on a barbecue grill would be like.  At the library--no way I was getting stuck without some reading material--I saw the grocery store family's counterpart.  They were checking out a bunch of DVD's, which will be great if we just get iced in.  Useless in a blackout. 

If not, I suggest you move along.  That's all that's going on around here today.  With a little pouting on the side, and the occasional heavy sigh.  This submission business is taking the starch out of me.  A rejection comes in, I rally, put the sucker right back in the mail.  I'm prepping the one book for agents, another for a contest, a third for an application to a workshop.  The worst part is that it takes time away from the thing I really enjoy: the writing.  If I spend three hours a day on writing related stuff, only half an hour of that is actually putting new words on the page.  The rest of it is working on submissions.  I'm doing what I'm supposed to be doing, but it just makes me feel depleted.  Depleted, but still dangerous, like uranium.  

Nah.  Not really.  In fact, it burned so little that I--gasp!--forgot to post about it.  I got my little rejection letter (for the story Word for a Thing, which I sent to Fiction magazine) on Saturday.  On Sunday, I sent it right back out to Grasslimb.  Neener.

I'm also counting agent query #6 as a rejection.  She's a non-response, both to the original query and my follow up saying, "Hey, did you get my query?"  There's one more thing to hate about e-mail queries.

Anyways, the plan for this week is--rewrite the query letter again, and send it out to #7.

To cheer me along, my friend Spucko sent me some Savage Chickens:

Evil_pencils

12 comments

Of course, the journey of a thousand publications begins the same way, but that was less funny as a title and more cheesily inspirational.  And, folks, if you're expecting inspirational, you are at the wrong blog.

I swore that as soon as the official reading season for literary magazines started, I'd send out every one of my short stories that I thought were in decent shape.  I'm here to report that I've kept my word.

12_disciples

There they are, all twelve of them, in the company of The File Box of Horror and the 2008 Novel & Short Story Writer's Market.  (Crap--how can that thing be out already?).  For your amusement and horror, I list what's going where:

1. Mid-American Review, Bad Blood (About a woman who wants to have a baby.)
2. New England Review, Before the 5 O'clock News (About a giant fungus and a man whose wife is dying.)
3. Cimarron Review, Water Landing (If you're a smoker, the odds are higher you'll die of lung cancer than in a plane crash caused by terrorists.)
4. Notre Dame Review, Whatever Happened to Joseph? (Even Jesus needed a step-father, didn't he?)
5. Rainbow Curve, Splinter (Remember the Snow Queen and how her kiss froze the little boy's heart?  It happens.  Subtitle by a friend of mine: That is some fucked up shit.)
6. Nimrod, Worst of It (Falling in love is scary as hell.)
7. The Journal, Better Homes and Gardens (Sometimes you're happier if you can forget things.)
8. Cottonwood, What Girls Are For (An uncle she hates, a cousin she loves, a funeral, and some funny business.)
9. Fiction, Word for a Thing (Based on a true story about a man who just forgot who he was and went missing for three years.)
10. Fence, Estate Sale Genealogy (an except from my novel, tentatively called Other Peoples' Dead Relatives.)
11. Quick Fiction, Fried Rice (You ever wonder about those women who lock their kids in the closet? I do.)
12. Strange Horizons, Keeper (Crazy things you tell yourself when you're not ready for your kids to grow up.)
    

Into the envelopes with their cover letters and self-addressed return envelopes, and then I pedaled pedaled my little bundles of joy over to this modest post office:

postal_box

Where I found this woman engaged in a lengthy transaction with the Postal Robot, which I guess is the new solution for disgruntled postal workers. 

Of course, when it was my turn to interact with the Postal Robot, I kept remembering all those Star Trek Next Generation episodes where Data went crazy and tried to kill people.  Oh, and the android in Alien.  Yup, not too sure about this whole technology thing.  At any rate, I didn't have too many difficulties and the Postal Robot prints out these adorable little stickers.  A mere quarter hour later I'd managed to get postage for all my submissions. 

Then down the postal chute they went, winging their way to New York, Las Vegas, Ohio, Oklahoma, and other points of literary interest.  Outside, my trusty steed was waiting to take me home.  No, you don't have to pay the parking meter if you park your bike there.  Although sometimes I do out of a strange charitable urge, when the car parked there has let the meter run down.

granny_bike

4 comments

Now, I can sit back and wait for the rejections acceptances to roll in. 

Yup, it's rejection again, speeding to me in a mere 21 days.  Oh, sure it's a form rejection, but I'll give Curtis Brown this: they reject people on nice stationery.

Rejection_5

I feel like an expectant father in the waiting room, but instead of a nurse coming in to tell me if it's a boy or a girl, I just get an e-mail saying, "It's a form letter."

I may as well keep with my Vox tradition and post the actual thing:

Dear Redzilla,

Thank you for submitting to Prospect Agency.

We greatly appreciate your submission, and have
given All of Flesh careful consideration.
Unfortunately, your project is not a good fit for
us at this time.

We wish you the best of luck in finding an
enthusiastic agent and in your writing career.
Again, thank you for thinking of Prospect Agency.

Respectfully,
Prospect Agency

At least it's not a reject letter, but it's still a downer.  It think it's the complete and utter impersonality of it.  A form letter seems to confirm that the person on the other end has glanced oh-so-briefly at the cover letter and first page.  If it had been more than a cursory glance, the letter would contain something specific to the actual submission.  I wonder, do agents and editors think writers are fooled by merge documents?  Back in the old days, when I typed up a rejection letter, if I typed in the author's name and the title, it meant something.  Now, of course, it just means that the agency knows how to use Word's merge function. 

The truth is that this rejection doesn't just go to eleven.  This one goes to fourteen.  That's how long my original list of likely agents was.  This was #4.  Ten left.  Here's hoping I don't have to work my way through all ten.