Hello, all.
It’s been an okay week, as far as writing goes. I pulled off 3500 words in Salt and Silver, plus some handwritten stuff. And I’ve decided, for sure, that I’ll be doing a follow-up novella to round out the story, with vague ideas of how it will go. I just have to finish off Salt and Silver, first.
Now, I’m not gonna lie to you. I didn’t do a damn thing with The Regonia Chronicles. Lol. I feel a bit shitty about that, too, since I’m so close to being done with the edit of Book one, Awakening.
But it’ll be fine. It’s not like I have a deadline for it…
Lol.
See, that’s funny, because publishers typically won’t look at series that aren’t complete. Unless, perhaps it was written by an author who’s already very successful. And, well, I still work in a tire factory to pay my bills, if that’s any indicator. Lol. So, me having a deadline for it is impossible.
And that paragraph gives you an idea of where my head has been for a while, now. Rejection is such a big part of writing, and the publishing world demands thick skin. The odds are never in favor of authors.
Small presses receive hundreds of submissions per month, and publish 5 to 10 books a year. Big publishers get thousands of submissions a month, and maybe publish 50 books a years.
Being that ONE that gets accepted…
You kinda just have to throw out an absolute fuck ton of submissions, and hope one sticks. Sort of like jokes in a lot of comedy shows, now. Tell a million jokes and someone will laugh.
So, in the interest of finding that one laugh, I’ve been submitting the three novels I have which are ready for submissions absolutely everywhere that wants their genres. As such, I got 12 to 15 rejections last month.
Some of these places, I’d submitted to months before, and their responses just happened to fall in the same time frame as the ones that only kept me waiting a couple weeks.
The first few, I shrugged off. The next few…stung. The next couple genuinely hurt. By the end of the three or four week span, it felt like the entire publishing industry was telling me to fuck off.
It sucked.
A lot.
But.
This is what I want to do with my life. This is who I am. Writing is in my bones. Hell, when I can’t sleep, I tell myself stories to relax my mind, which, incidentally, is where the opening scene for Salt and Silver came from. Several sleepless nights saw the entire first scene mapped out.
I am here to tell stories that make people feel.
It’s so easy to let all the stuff around us desensitize us. Being numb just happens sometimes.
Sometimes you just need to feel.
Yeah, sometimes my stories hurt. But they also bring joy.
And I can’t see myself pursuing any other career.
For so much of my life, my only dreams for myself were to avoid being a disappointment, be financially stable, and to end up in a relationship that didn’t consist of constant fighting. I didn’t dare to ask the universe for more, and I certainly didn’t see myself as being worth any more than those very simple requests.
It wasn’t until I was 24 that I had the courage and self esteem to dream of being an author. Sure, I wrote before that, but I never took it seriously as anything more than just venting my emotions. It took a couple years more to get the guts to stop dragging my feet, and seriously start pursuing writing professionally.
But now that I have that dream, now that I’ve started trying, I can’t back down.
So, as bad as last month hurt, I’m going to keep moving forward. I’ll be sending out more submissions in the coming weeks, and, above all, I’m going to keep writing.
Because this is just…me.
So, to all of you facing rejection, just stay true to who you are. Do what you need to do to get to where you want to be in life. It hurts, and there are times when it feels absolutely impossible.
But it isn’t going to happen if you don’t try.
And with that, I’ll be signing off.
Keep reading. Keep writing.
Later.
