Sometimes, and those times can never be predicted, a rejection will hit different.
It won’t ping off the battle-worn armor I’ve constructed. It will find a gap, discover uncovered flesh, softness just waiting to be sliced. And that form email, or that slightly personalized note, a message saying thanks but no thanks, it will sink into my exposed gut and stop up my lungs and squeeze my tear ducts. The letters will rearrange and I will read how pathetic my efforts are, how much the team laughed at my submission, how I don’t belong. I’m defeated, depleted, in the middle of a weekday, my day job emails piling up, my black hole inside opening wide, waiting for me to fall.
Other times, I log the rejection in my massive spreadsheet, delete the email, and move on.
*
The Excel docs are spread across projects, across stories and essays and books. Hundreds of lines of magazines, presses, agents, grayed out and sorted down.
And that’s the game, right? Write and submit, and write and submit, and hope and wish and pray, hustle and scrap, churn and burn.
Grow thick skin; detach; kill your darlings. But also love hard, and be vulnerable, and write from the heart. Keep steady when receiving criticism, and don’t take it personally, and Jesus, why are you getting upset? But also care, dig deep, put everything you have and are into your work before you submit.
*
And I can do it. I can play the game, and work the system.
I did do it. After years and years of rejections, I got a story published. Then another. I got a story collection published. I won a contest and got another collection published. I got essays, and an entire memoir, out in the world.
But on some random Tuesday at three in the afternoon, all of that will mean absolutely nothing when I get another rejection. I’m right back where I started.
And I remember how much I hate games.
*
Other writers question this game from the start.
They look at the fuckery that is the publishing industry, and reject the traditional route. They don’t care about having some sort of external validation, have no need for the gatekeepers to let them through. They take the means of production into their own hands, without publishers and agents and awards and all the trappings of this system.
I was never brave enough to follow their lead. I needed the validation of the gatekeepers, needed someone in authority to tell me I was good enough.
And when I didn’t get that, I believed them. I believed that I didn’t belong.
*
But something is changing.
Maybe because I began to accumulate acceptances. Maybe because I started my own literary magazine, and discovered many, many rejections are a matter of space, and specific needs, not about the writing. Maybe because the world is run by misogynist mercenaries. Maybe because many of the gatekeepers are biased. Maybe because, as my age has increased, the opinions I care about have plummeted. Maybe because I know that I’m a storyteller, and it’s time to tell all the stories.
Maybe for all these reasons or others, I’m finally questioning the game.
*
And maybe that's also why I want to talk about rejection. Really talk about it. Get mathematical.
I don’t often see writers talking about their numbers games. But I want to talk about it. I want to share how many times I’ve been rejected. I want to share how much we’re told we can’t get published, and how we keep trying anyway.
And I want to share work that has been rejected. Because I don’t believe them anymore.
Instead, I believe that some people will like these stories, and find value in them, even find resistance in them. That’s all that matters now.
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I'm sharing my rejected work here. I'm deciding to redeem it.
I want to talk about your rejection too. I want to talk about your bravery in the midst of rejection. I want to talk about how you can redeem your work. I want to talk about how we can make weird art in the face of state terror. I want it all.
If you do too, join me.