If the world is going to end, apparently it is going to end with a writing rejection. I received the penultimate rejection for O-Taga-San today. I will send it to Scape when they reopen for submissions in February, when it will receive its final rejection and I will retire it.
A little context: O-Taga-San was accepted twice, and languished for a year each time before I pulled it. It had a near miss at one magazine, but that’s about all the love it’s gotten. I’ve just about hit all the markets I planned to with it.
I am pleased with the story. I like it a lot. It’s just not hitting other people’s cylinders. So it goes. The reason I give it so much attention is that it is the ONLY piece I have circulating at the moment. In order to complete novels with my small amounts of writing time, I need to write novels when I have time. Short stories take away from that time.
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Soon, I will be sending a novel out. This week and next I’ll be working hard at boiling down a lot of editing commentary and sharpening the middle grade novel I’ve been working on. I am pleased with the story. I believe that this time, I’ve done my best, and I’ve mastered at every turn the temptation to send it out before it was ready. I believe I learned a lot at Taos about how to make a novel move.
Will an agent pick me up? I don’t know. Will someone buy it to publish it? I don’t know. I have confidence in the work. Rejection is something I live with. This will be what it will be.
And then I have been asked for a novella. I have some rethinking to do there, since it’s in a much earlier draft stage. I don’t know if it will be picked up or not. But I won’t send it until I have the same confidence in the work.
I can’t do much about rejection. Writers should be willing to change their work, sure, but the intrinsic value of knowing that you’ve done a good job might be all you get for a long period of time. That doesn’t seem to be a bad note to have the world end on.
