Rejection: Get over it
Writing
Rejection: Get over it
Writing

Rejection: Get over it

Jonath­an just nagged me to blog, coz I’ve neg­lected it. Ok fine. I thought about blog­ging about the Cana­dian polit­ic­al cir­cus, but then I decided that some people are afraid of clowns, so I’d bet­ter not. It’s a busy time, com­ing up to Christ­mas. School con­certs, shop­ping, din­ner guests, dec­or­at­ing… My advent cal­en­dar says we’re sup­posed to buy a tree today. Con­sid­er­ing I haven’t done the advent cal­en­dar tasks I was sup­posed to do yes­ter­day nor the day before, I can­’t guar­an­tee that the tree will hap­pen today.


Really, what I want to talk about today is rejec­tion. Again. I got a let­ter from Eddie Schneider yes­ter­day. It simply was not to his taste, and there’s noth­ing I can do about that. Rats. But you know the worst part about get­ting rejec­ted, once I’ve got­ten through the ini­tial drag of read­ing the let­ter and a bit of, “Why am I doing this to myself? Why don’t I pur­sue some oth­er career instead?” Really the worst part is telling oth­er people. I always feel like I’m giv­ing bad news. Like a doc­tor who has to say, “Sorry, your tests res­ults showed a pos­it­ive indic­a­tion for [insert Really Crummy Con­di­tion here].” 

Every­one cares so much and they get excited for me whenev­er some­thing cool hap­pens in this long and often pain­ful pro­cess, and I hate hav­ing to go around and tell people that it was just anoth­er false alarm. There’s a small part of me that cringes and wants to hide away and pre­tend it did­n’t hap­pen, but that’s because there’s a nig­gling fear that being rejec­ted means my work is bad; and maybe it’s a great­er fear that if I tell people my work was rejec­ted, they will believe my work is bad.

As Tom keeps remind­ing me, Jasper Fforde received 75 rejec­tions for The Eyre Affair before he hit paydirt. 

The point is that the announce­ment of a rejec­tion needs to be just as mat­ter of fact as the announce­ment of the request for sub­mis­sion. Work through the misery and dejec­tion and des­pond­ency (a pro­cess which should take about… 13 minutes) and then hunker down and get back to work. So here goes: Ladies and Gen­tle­men… I received a rejec­tion from Eddie Schneider yesterday! 

Now where’s my pen?