Rejection Fu

A one-line rejection on a full? Yeah, that's fun. Awesome. Keep it coming! Lemon juice or salt in my cuts? Hey, why not both?

The challenge with rejection, I've decided, is not to avoid giving up. All I do is get angry and determined, so I've never seriously considered the idea of stopping. No, the challenge is not letting the rejection own you. That resentment can take over the day, take over the writing, block the flow of creativity and the already-elusive state of relaxed and disciplined openness that writing needs.

And there's a humility too it, also. I don't mean the humility of being reminded that somebody doesn't like the book; big deal, that's unavoidable. Unavoidable.

I mean the humility of diving back into the work-in-progress. Those characters, as the book arcs up to the climax, are in trouble. Really in trouble. I mean, I sit at a desk and open bad-news e-mails: big deal. But these poor people are absolutely screwed unless they come up with a good way, a convincing and realistic and (in retrospect) inevitable way to win or at least survive. And things, to put it mildly, do not look good.

They're the ones facing truly bad news: my job is to just write it down so it makes sense. And that puts one-line e-mails in perspective.