Rejections

The Janes are discussing rejections all this month and today it’s my turn. Head on over to See Jane Publish to participate in the discussion of how to learn to live with rejections and what constitutes a good rejection. In the writing world, rejections are so common that Dictionary.com uses “The publisher rejected the author’s latest novel.” as an example for how to properly use “reject” in a sentence. In other words, if you want to be a writer, you have to learn to handle—or at least live with—rejections. It took me a long time. I wanted people, specifically people in the …

No matter what Jim Hanas says about writers being caught up in the lottery of “rejection porn,” I love reading about successful writers who made it after a gazillion rejections. I’m a sucker for lists that tells me how many times authors like J.K. Rowling, Louis L’Amour, Dan Brown, and C.S. Lewis were rejected. Why? Because knowing others found success after rejections is what kept me submitting my manuscript even though I gained a total of forty-seven forty-nine rejections. (Update: after I sold, I received 2 more rejections from retracted queries.) Fifteen of those were on full requests. And, to make things worse, …

It’s time for my inaugural post at See Jane Publish. In honor of Halloween month October, all the Janes are writing about scary things in writing and publishing. Hop on over to see what terrifies me. I’m on my way toward becoming a professional writer, an author. I know this because I’ve measured success one rejection letter at a time. Slowly—oh so slowly—the responses to my queries went from no reply to form reply to personalized rejection to editorial feedback. And then, I arrived in that magical place where agents and editors wanted to read my first three chapters. Some …

The last few weeks I’ve been obsessed about e-pub vs. print and self publish vs. traditional houses. Over at Bark I blogged about how I learned that the term “self-published” is too filled with negativity, so the hip new term is “indie author.” I also wrote about how a writer friend emailed me Jim C. Hall’s very funny cartoon to get me to shut up about the whole thing. Well, I’m happy to report that I’m not longer obsessing. The Rose City Spring Intensive has renewed my enthusiasm for writing, given me new hope about getting published, and shown me—yet …

My last blog was ages and ages ago, sorry about that. Work took up all time last quarter because I decided to teach an overload—bad decision—of a class I’d never taught before. Then Christmas came, then my computer crashed, and the normal cycle of life happened where writing seems to take a backseat. The good news is I’m still writing and meeting with my critique group; the bad news is I still don’t have a book deal. Or is that actually bad news? I have a few writer friends who are very successful and have been churning out at least …