There's nothing worse for a writer to see a "Thanks, but no thanks" letter in their email. People say it's the way things are. Rejection is part of life.
You can throw a rock at a writer's conference and hit any bright-eyed hopeful that has been rejected. You might get lucky and hit a published author who earned their fair share of rejections. They'll turn to you and try to throw in some logic, "I got [insert random number] rejections before I published my first book. Just keep pushing."
Keep pushing. Keep going. Everyone says "don't give up." Then you have those that say, "Write something else." That's probably the worse advice of all. Sure I'll just plop down in my handy dandy writing chair and spend the next 9 years writing a brand new story filled with brand new characters, a brand new voice, and a brand new plot. How hard could it be?
I have seven ideas sitting in my documents folder. Seven ideas I started writing because I was told to "write something else." All seven put together never made it passed a grand total of 10,000 words. Why? Because my heart isn't there. The go-to advice of "write something else" seems to work for some people, but it's not one-size-fits-all advice. More people should learn that before throwing it out there.
There probably won't be anything else for me to write, at least not in this lifetime. The story I have to tell is the one I want to be told. Not something that will please others.
So I have two choices:
- I can continue to mentally torture myself with querying agents, small pubs, and maybe even self-publish, editing my MS until it's no longer recognizable, and hope and pray someone gives me the slightest bit of chance.
- I can give my sanity a break and quit.
My Twitter account is gone and this blog may soon follow. I guess we'll find out in the next week.
Good luck to the rest of you out there. You all are a lot stronger than I am.
