Rejection letters

[anthimeria]

They're a necessary rite of passage.  And they suck.

For the most part I'm able to breathe in and out a few times and move on.  There are a myriad of reasons short stories get rejected--this essay by Marion Zimmer Bradley sheds some light--but that can be hard to remember when you've just gotten three rejection letters in two days.

Like I just did.

Rejection letters have never made me throw up my hands and long to quit--I want to be a writer too badly--but I have on occasion put off sending a story out again until I felt I could deal with the whole process of finding another market suitable to the story.  That's pretty much the head space I'm in right now.  Three pieces to find new markets for--I'm sure I'll have a bout of "ooh, what's this shiny new magazine?" and "I bet X story would fit into Y magazine, how silly of me not to consider that!" in a few days.  Right now I'm curling up on a couch with a book and wallowing.

I won't ever give up.  But sometimes I do need a break.

So I'm . . . sending this out into the internet void.  The point of this post isn't to garner sympathy--I'd rather think of it as draining the wound, and maybe as an offer of empathy, if someone needs it.  Consider it self-therapy (I'm out of ice cream).  If you've had a rejection letter lately, feel free to commiserate.

Comments

[midnightsmagic.livejournal.com]

I wish I could empathize. Sympathize, certainly, but you know me and my bizarre affinity for rejection letters. I should write a blog post about that... (P.S. I have a professional blog now too! :P)

Congrats on the progress, even if it doesn't feel like you're heading anywhere sometimes. *hugs*

[anthimeria]

I'm usually okay with rejection letters! I just got three form rejection letters in a row and it was something of a downer.

Ooh, what's your blog?

[midnightsmagic.livejournal.com]

...I suppose a link would have been helpful there. I'm going to try to set up an OpenID so that I can actually sign comments using my professional blog, but in the meantime, I'm at the very uncreatively named http://www.elenagleason.com

[gramina]

I have *no idea* if this is parallel enough to be even faintly useful, wrt rejection letters, but the closest I have to that in my life is job applications/interviews that do not result in getting the job.

I do not, I would like to point out, consistently succeed in taking this attitude, but the attitude I strive for is:

"In good economic times, it takes an *average* of twenty-five resumes sent out to get one interview, and an average of (three to five) interviews to get a job. Every resume I work on and send out, every interview I dress and prepare for and go to, is one of those, even if it's not the one that gets me the job."

I hate not hearing back when I send in a resume, and I hate the wait to be told "no, you were second best this time too," but every one of those is a statistically necessary step on the way to a job. So I try to look at it more that way than - my instinct! - "I'm a failure and everyone can tell just by looking and I'm never going to work again and I'll die alone and friendless and starving in the streets and be buried under my pile of bag-lady bags---!"

For, you know, what it's worth -- probably the cost of the pixels :)

[anthimeria]

The resume parallel is definitely useful--I'm sending those out, too. At least you almost always hear back from story submissions, even if it's a form "Thanks but no thanks."

I guess statistics can be useful!