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,…

(Also posted on Bark) It’s summer, I don’t have to go back to full time teaching until the fall and in between the projects on my to do list for this time off (garden work that will never happen, filling out the paperwork for becoming an American citizen, brushing the dog, planning for lessons, watching bad TV) I thought I would do some writing. However, my motivation to put words on paper plummeted to the lowest low when Monday’s mail brought  two rejection letters. Scott, Shira, and Sam have already “barked” on the subject and I don’t have anything to…