Rejection, rejection, rejection...

Discussion in 'Traditional Publishing' started by deadrats, Aug 19, 2016.

  1. deadrats

    deadrats Contributor Contributor

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    I hear you @matwoolf But who ever really wins those contests? You're quite talented and have a lot to offer the world. I'll be your biggest cheerleader if you want. :)
     
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  2. matwoolf

    matwoolf Banned Contributor

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    Hey @dr, i’m jess riffing - can’t express so well on the telephone texting...but...but...not very engaged ...ach, you know...only a ‘wobble.’
     
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  3. deadrats

    deadrats Contributor Contributor

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    I submitted a different story to their magazine Carve. Maybe you should give them a try through their regular submissions. I have a friend who submitted to the magazine and got a very detailed response, still a rejection, but he found it helpful.

    If you want a list a free places to submit, I can message you my submission lineup for this fall. I'm trying to avoid reading fees because I can't really afford them right now. But a ton of places will reopen to submissions soon. It can't hurt, and you might actually do pretty well.

    As always, I'm happy to read anything you want some extra eyes on.
     
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  4. Krispee

    Krispee Contributor Contributor

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    Ha, maybe you pressed the wrong symbol, I do that sometimes as I don't know what they all mean. I mean I'm a techy and I don't get the hang of Twitter. Mind you if you are a celebrity and you have a Twitter account you have to watch your back, as some people rake up your old Tweets and break you with them. It's a brave new world don't you know.
    I have quite a few followers, although I don't know what they are looking at because I don't tweet anything. Perhaps I have an unusual magnetic appeal that crosses the the internet divide. ;)

    Second that on the eyes, although Deadrats is very good with the crits I must say, very helpful.
     
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  5. Maz Lang

    Maz Lang New Member

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    self publish... thats what im gonna do and sell on amazon etc... x
     
  6. Krispee

    Krispee Contributor Contributor

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    Well, that's an option a lot of people are going for, but mainly for novels, full length. If you have a group of shorts you could go down that route otherwise that isn't really on the table.
     
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  7. deadrats

    deadrats Contributor Contributor

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    That's great if that's what you want to do, but most of us on this thread aren't interested in that. This is a thread about rejection because there is a lot of it and every writer who tries to put their work out there is going to face rejection. Sure, anyone can self publish. And that's part of the problem -- that anyone can do it. The focus of this thread is on selling work to literary journals which is a completely different path than self publishing.
     
  8. deadrats

    deadrats Contributor Contributor

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    So, I haven't been rejected in a week. I hope I'm not jinxing myself, but my next response will be number 100 in the last 12 months. And I thought it was a hard thing to get 100 rejections in a year. But I would really like to put off reaching 100 rejections in a year for a little longer. Can't the next one just be an acceptance? Come on, lucky no. 100.
     
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  9. Alex R. Encomienda

    Alex R. Encomienda Contributor Contributor

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    Three rejections in two days. It's okay though, i'm used to it.
     
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  10. deadrats

    deadrats Contributor Contributor

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    Made it through another weekend rejection free. :)
     
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  11. deadrats

    deadrats Contributor Contributor

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    I was getting a little too comfortable with all this time of from rejections. Yes, it came. I have received 100 rejections in the last 12 months. Today's rejection was a 45-day form rejection from filling Station.
     
  12. graveleye

    graveleye Senior Member

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    well, every rejection is one closer to acceptance.
     
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  13. deadrats

    deadrats Contributor Contributor

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    How so? It's not like you need a certain number of rejections to have something accepted. This really isn't a math thing. Sure, it's nice to say something like that, but I don't think it's true.
     
  14. Krispee

    Krispee Contributor Contributor

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    That's one every 3.65 days, although writing that probably won't make you feel any better. :(
    Filling Station sounds like somewhere you go to get petrol not stories. I guess you can 'fill up' with words instead. :D
     
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  15. deadrats

    deadrats Contributor Contributor

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    I really do get rejected A LOT! I wonder what sort of effect so much rejection might have on a personal overall. There have been several hundred rejections over recent years, but this is the first time I've hit 100 in 12 months. And, yeah, a rejection every few days seems about right.
     
  16. Krispee

    Krispee Contributor Contributor

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    That kind of rejection is tough. I guess the old saying, 'what doesn't kill you makes you stronger', might be true here.
     
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  17. BayView

    BayView Huh. Interesting. Contributor

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    May be helpful to think of the rejection as being not of you? I mean, you're not sending yourself to these places!
     
  18. deadrats

    deadrats Contributor Contributor

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    Yes, but I am still the creator of what's being rejected. It's my best efforts being rejected. I guess the fact that I continuously write and submit, it probably helps. I mean I have way more submissions out there than I could possibly receive rejections on in a day, a week... A lot of my submissions are going to take a long time to get rejected. I've got some things out that could be seen as promising. Waiting for those makes me less concerned with some other rejections.
     
  19. ChickenFreak

    ChickenFreak Contributor Contributor

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    I think the result is likely to be burnout.

    There's a quote about burnout that went around the programmer community:

    No. Burnout is caused when you repeatedly make large amounts of sacrifice and or effort into high-risk problems that fail. It's the result of a negative prediction error in the nucleus accumbens. You effectively condition your brain to associate work with failure.

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5630445

    I'm burned out at my job, not from overwork, but from too many "my work is leading to nothing" experiences. I warn you that burnout is not something under your control--it hits abruptly, and the your brain says, "You want to put creative cognitive effort into that thing that hasn't rewarded me all this time? Very funny. Not gonna happen."

    Writing and submitting for publication is inherently a "fail a lot until you succeed" thing--that's how it's expected to go--but your brain doesn't necessarily understand that nuance.

    A quote from the same page, by a grad student in the sciences:

    The nature of the culture means that grad students are "groomed" by sticking them on low-probability of success, high reward fishing expeditions (gotta get those nature, science papers) I used to burn out for months after accumulating many many hours of work on high-risk projects. I saw other grad students get it really bad, and burn out for years.

    ...On the heels of the failure of a project where I have spent weeks building up for, I will quickly force myself to do routine molecular biology, or general lab tasks, or a repeat of an experiment that I have gotten to work in the past. These all have an immediate reward. Now I don't burn out anymore, and find it easier to re-attempt very difficult things, with a clearer mindset.

    If I were you, I'd find a way to associate some part of your writing life with reliable reward--even if the reward feels rote and obvious.

    Figuring out the "reliable reward" is a difficulty. A blog? A critique partner or group that reliably makes you feel good about your writing? A friend with a website who'd be ecstatic to have someone write good copy? A charity that has the same need?

    I realize that all of those things might be a waste of your talent, just as doing routine work for the scientist above might be a waste of their talent. But the goal is to feed your brain, reliably, with some sort of reward associated with writing. The part of your brain that decides, "Is this worth it?" is, I believe, not capable of the cognition required for, "Yes, if we just keep on going and going. Ignore those disappointments; they're just part of the whole effort." You have to occasionally feed that part of the brain a cookie.
     
  20. deadrats

    deadrats Contributor Contributor

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    I've burned out before from writing and other things so I know it can happen, but it's never really been a result of rejection. Or it probably has been. I'm not looking for any sort of reward other than to write things that get published in great places. I guess having that happen ever so infrequently is enough to keep me going, foolishly believing it can happen again.
     
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  21. BayView

    BayView Huh. Interesting. Contributor

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    I remember a story about the search and rescue dogs after the World Trade Center getting depressed because they were trained to find live people and there weren't any. So the trainers would set up mock "searches" with volunteers hidden in the debris, just so the dogs could find them and get a sense of accomplishment.

    Possibly related: one of the most stressful situations, as I understand it, is to be responsible for things over which you have no control. Responsibility itself, even if it's for really, really important stuff, isn't necessarily stressful, but responsibility without control, even over something relatively minor, is super hard to take. And, really, we don't have a lot of control over what goes on with our manuscripts. Sure, we need to produce good quality work, but even if we do - maybe it's of a type that's just not selling, or maybe it's got the same theme as a story the magazine published just last issue, or maybe that editor just doesn't care for your work, or maybe any number of other things that are out of our control. So... stressful. Yup.

    I try to keep my writing goals as things that are under my control (not "I'll get published by X publisher" or "I'll sell Y number of copies", but rather "I'll finish this manuscript by day Z and edit it to the best of my ability by day W," or whatever. Not magic, but helpful!
     
  22. deadrats

    deadrats Contributor Contributor

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    I stress about money the most when it comes to writing. And I do focus on the things I can control. I focus more on my output than my input. With the exception of a few slips, I have been sending out a story a week for a long time. When I'm waiting on certain publications, I work on a new story for that publication so I'm ready to go when a rejection comes in. There are some places that have rejected almost everything I written. But there are also some places that have taken my work and do think I'm important. And publishing where I have been lucky does make all the rejection worth it. Sure, trying for the top in hard, but it's not impossible. I'm willing to do the work and take the inevitable rejections that are always going to outweigh the acceptances.
     
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  23. Spencer1990

    Spencer1990 Contributor Contributor

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    I think there is something to this.

    Stick with me here; I promise I'll loop back to rejection.

    As I've mentioned before, I work in recovery as a milieu counselor. My job is to 1) do the intakes and 2) to peer mentor the patients after they've been admitted into the facility. A lot of times, I work with these people for a month or however long their insurance allows them to stay in the facility. I get close to them, build a rapport, listen to their traumas, offer advice, make suggestions, etc. Most of the time, they relapse within a couple weeks of leaving the facility because they're no longer in a bubble. They leave and go back to doing exactly what they were doing. It leads to a certain amount of "no matter what I do, I have no say in whether or not these people succeed." That's tough. Even more difficult is when I spend a month with someone, then they leave the facility, shoot heroin (or whatever), and die. This happens every few months, on average. I have no control over the situation, and I've invested so much emotional energy into these people that it becomes very difficult for me to reconcile the usefulness of my position. Intellectually, I know that I've made a positive impact, but my irritational brain has a tough time with it, and I think that's because, as you talk about, Bay, being responsible for something I have no control over is a tough pill to swallow.

    I think this is pretty similar to what happens with rejection in the literary world. A lot of us put so much of ourselves into this work, send it out, and no matter how brilliant, slick, genius, whatever, the prose is, we are almost guaranteed rejection. I think it's a similar process at work with that and what happens with the people I work with.

    I don't know where I'm going with this, but all this talk got me thinking about it.
     
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  24. deadrats

    deadrats Contributor Contributor

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    It could be the rejection that's actually making me a better writer. It makes me write more. It makes me submit more. Those things are in my control. Trying my hardest is in my control, and that's all I'm really doing. Of course, no one wants to be rejected, but I don't think anyone else submitting to the same places is going to have an easier time than I am. This is hard. It's always going to be hard. If it wasn't so hard, it wouldn't be wanted so much by so many.
     
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  25. Krispee

    Krispee Contributor Contributor

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    Like benching a player because they're not playing well enough in the hopes of spurring them on to do better? Rejection is spurring you on to write better? It's good if you can take that on, it would give you what Chicken Freak wrote of earlier, the reward that your brain craves for the work you put in. Risk and reward; that's what writing is in a sense, only the reward part is hard to find.
    I guess you just have to find the reward in the part that doesn't rely on outside sources.
     
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