On rejections

They’re tough, turns out.

In the time since my last post (during which you, oh internet ghost, have surely anxiously awaited the next pithy update I have on my writing journey), I wrote another short story. Huzzah! I’ve entitled it A Hundred Days and a Lifetime. As with The World-Eater, I’m really rather proud of it and think it might be my best. (May every next word I write be something I’m convinced might be my best!)

But with every new piece comes the first rejection of that piece. It’s vicious: you sweat and bleed and create something entirely new that you are certain is it, the thing that’ll finally get your foot in the door, and after several painstaking rounds of editing and showing it to others you hit that “submit” button on the first market, and… some time later, it’s rejected.

Not what they’re looking for, not quite right at this time, just not a fit for the magazine, various other barely distinguishable strings of words that are all cold, flat, form rejections.

There is a great deal I could say about the nature of the writer-publisher relationship. This post, though, deals with the personal impact of those words. Regardless of all the reasons that letter was sent to you at the time it was sent to you in the form it was sent to you, it hurts. It hurts, because you can’t see the effort the readers put in, you can’t see what parts of your work made them smile, you can’t see what better writing they prefer (short of reading an issue six months or more in the future). All you see is a form rejection, putting you on the same level as if you’d shat in a can and written a sonnet about it, making you wonder if they even read past the first line to that part you really like. They likely did. But you don’t know.

It’s a difficult thing that I’m still learning to deal with. (Very demotivating. Makes it near certain I’ll have a less-than-spectacular day.) But I do keep coming back to a good bit of advice I saw recently. Every time I write a new story and submit it somewhere that’s rejected me before, I think to myself: “Reject this.”