My writing group this week talked about submissions and ways to feel good about yourself through the rejection. For the most part, I'm pretty good about rejection. What people like is subjective, etc. Maybe they'd already agreed to publish someone else's story, which is completely inferior, but also about weasels, and they can't have two weasel stories, and even though it's the hardest decision they've ever made, they need to do the right thing and not call this first writer to tell them that, actually, they've found a better story about weasels, so...
But then sometimes I get my hopes up, and let myself get crushed, and then it's work to get rolling again. So the writing group time was timely and invigorating.
My friend running the group talked about a Sara Connell lecture she went to recently. A lot of it sounded like The Secret and just a bit too silly for me. For example, we wrote acceptance letters to ourselves, to visualize what it would look like, and now that letter is going to come, and it's going to look just exactly the same. Here's an except from mine: "We offer $0.08 per word, so please fill out and return the attached tax documents within 5 business days." I had just finished sending out 1099s. I don't think this happens in acceptance letters, but, now that I've poured my good vibes into it, it will!
We were also supposed to pick a future goal and talk about it as though it had already happened. Even in a goofy exercise with my writing group, lying about my accomplishments felt gross. "Why yes, I do have two PhDs from Oxford and cancer. It's sad. But also inspirational. Don't you feel inspired by me? And also I sent you those tax documents last week. Did you not get them? Did they get caught in your spam filter? No? G-mail must have eaten them, because I definitely sent them. Arg! Let me try again, but this time with a special computer-savvy step that only I know about to make sure it goes through. Did that work? Yeah, because I'm great at computers."
See? That got out of control real fast.
Some of the tricks, however, I found really helpful. There was one called "writing a love letter to yourself," which includes five things you like about the thing you're going to submit. The love letter part sounds silly, but a bulleted list of five things that are good about a story was mind opening. Yes, this story is good. It's worth submitting it and submitting it and submitting it, because it's going to find a home. It's going to find a home for these reasons. Keep trying. That was helpful.
Another suggestion was to aim for 100 submissions rather than 100 rejections. That way it puts the focus on the process you can control, rather than on the part where you fail. I usually aim for 100 rejections, but I heard this and now I'll never go back. I like to think about my rejections (submissions) as pokemon. You gotta catch them all. When you get to a second round, your pokemon evolves. While querying my novel, I kept track of which pokemon I'd caught, and I realized that I should start up again with this new round of sending stories to literary magazines. Let me show you my Pokemans.
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