Monthly Archives: June 2011

So I’m back, having made it through the last week with whatever sanity I still have (mostly) intact.  I managed quite well, actually, being alone in the office and having to do ALL THE WORK BY MYSELF.

Rawr. I am powerful secretary.

I’ve actually been on this weird self-empowerment stand-up-for-myself kick lately that is rather odd. Well, for me anyway. And I feel cute today. Which is extremely odd.

So I made it through the week alone and didn’t end up buried in a pile of mortgage documents and emails and actually got everything done, except for one thing.

I didn’t write. All week. I didn’t have any time to pluck away at my current projects at work, I didn’t have any energy to do so by the time I got home.  I did think about what I’m working on, and I think I solved one of the problems in “Consignment” – it will take some significant rewriting and deleting a few scenes and going backwards a bit, but now I know how to get the plot back on track. It had gotten a bit lost before, where a subplot threatened to overtake the main plot and really, there’s not that much room for extraneous threads in a short story.

So that thread gets snipped. Sometimes you have to do that to keep going.

Hopefully now that I’ve gotten past the Horror Week this year, I can take a page from Chuck Wendig’s book and “Finish the Shit that I’ve Started.”  I’ll be going back to blogging on my regular MWF schedule, barring unforeseen interruptions or random cat attacks.   I do think that perhaps I focused my blogging a bit too heavily on my writing lately and will be going back to adding in some other things that I also obsess over.

And back to my writing. A week without writing just makes me weary.

Comic by Inkygirl

Every freelance writer has their own little pile of rejection letters.  Stephen King kept his on a stake in the wall.  Mine is more of a figurative pile, in this digital age, where they land in a specially designated folder in my gmail account, and get a notation in the spreadsheet I use to keep track of my submissions.

Most of them aren’t much help, being form letters of some sort or another, generally of the “Thank you for your interest, but this isn’t for us” type.  But there are rare rejection letters that are cherished almost as much as my acceptances.

These are the ones that aren’t form responses. The rejections that tell me exactly what the problems are.  They offer a real, honest critique of my work.

These rejections offer something I can work with, something I can learn from.  The editor doesn’t have to do this. They don’t have to go to the trouble of giving this advice, but they do.  These are the letters that I print and keep and return to when I need a hand.

I could get angry at the rejection – at the early stages, I did, quite often.  Being a creative person, I am, of course, rather narcissistic. I don’t take criticism or rejection well.

It’s hard to learn to treasure these rejections, but treasure them I do. On multiple occasions rejections such as these have turned into sales when I took the advice, rewrote my story, and resubmitted.  Even when they didn’t, they offered something useful that I could use later.

So, I offer a thank you to the editors out there who are willing to sit down and become teachers, who offer real advice.  I know your time is limited.  I know that you are telling me that you have seen something valuable in my writing even as you turn me away – something valuable enough to give me real advice when a form letter would do the job well enough.

And so I take that advice. I listen.