I have wonderful timing. This week’s theme of rejection could not be more apropos. The Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award first cuts were made last night and it looks like I’m not one of the 836 people who advanced to the next round. I have yet to receive my official rejection email but I imagine it will come along soon enough. Or it won’t. Perhaps I’ve also been rejected from the rejection email receiving list.

Feeling less than jolly, I called my very good friend Todd Fahnestock (who is one of the most inspiring people I’ve ever had the fortune to know), and he told me about Frank Herbert who spent years trying to sell Dune. After it got rejected by 20 publishers, he sold it to a tiny publisher in Philadelphia that, according to Wikipedia, was primarily known for auto repair manuals.

I tried to read Dune once. Couldn’t get into it. Nevertheless, Herbert’s undeniably a legend who, along with Heinlein, changed the face of the sci-fi genre.

Feeling somewhat cheered, I visited Amazon to check out some of the competition. This was perhaps not the wisest course of action since I was still feeling a tad ungenerous. Not surprisingly, almost all of the entries I scanned were–how to say this in a way that will make me sound enlightened rather than bitter and washed up?–utter crap written by morons with no more understanding of story, pacing, or grammar than the average jelly fish. Perhaps I was not quite as cheered as I imagined.

After a good night’s sleep, however, I’m feeling much better.

The point of the last week’s entries has been to explore rejection. I’d originally planned to lead up to a semi-profound statement about how, in a world with no wild frontiers left for ambitious men and women to explore and conquer, we are left to challenge ourselves–to prove ourselves–by seeking to live the life we truly want in a world that would prefer to make cogs of us all. I was going to write about how the journey to publication and success as an author is truly a mythic journey fraught with endless perils and profoundly stacked odds, wherein one must steel oneself to endure and, one day, triumph. But I’m not going to write any of that. Not today, anyway.

I’m not going to do it because it all rings a little hollow this morning. I think there is only one valid response to rejection. Only one necessary response. Keep writing. So that’s what I’m going to do.

As painful as this is, here goes: rejection a-go-go!

(P.S. – If you’re curious why I’m engaging in this bit of masochism, please see my previous post)

1/9: I must admit that I enjoyed Caleb Cross and Bigger Falkirk as characters, and I thought Brown handled the challenges to their friendship thoughtfully. But after talking about it here, I have to pass: Ultimately, we weren’t convinced we could sell this as successfully as another house might.

11/12: I am sorry to say that after much deliberation I am not going to bid on the Warrior’s Son. This was a maddening novel–at times brilliant, at other perplexing, and in the end I did not figure an elegant editorial solution to tie the disparate elements into a cohesive whole. The author can write well, but at times, it seemed his writing got in the way of the storytelling. I wish you all the best with it, but I will pass.

10/30: Many thanks for giving me the chance to consider The Warrior’s Son. I was hugely impressed by the imagination and narrative energy Brown has packed into his tale. I especially liked the parallel stories of Julio & Jose and Caleb & Bigger and the way the “historical” story commented on the (our?) modern one. I loved that Brown made that loquacious and deadly book a character–and a likeable one at that! While I suspect that much of this novel went over my head, I nonetheless applaud Brown’s obvious belief that there is a place for religion and mysticism and parable within a “commercial”–and often profanity-laced–story. He’s a writer full of contradictions and I think there is something intriguing and appealing about that.

My problem is that I’ve never had a good handle on commercial fiction…and I think I’m the wrong person to steer this book to its widest possible audience. As out-of-touch as I am with the market for commercial fiction, ****** Press is even more so. We’re all about serious, review-driven literary fiction and left-wing political nonfiction. I’m trying to get the Press to stretch in some ways, but I think The Warrior’s Son is just too far afield from what we do well.

10/22: I read THE WARRIOR’S SON this weekend, and while I liked the premise, I’m afraid I didn’t feel that Bigger and his childhood friend were compelling enough as protagonists for this to have a Gumplike appeal; and ultimately I’ll have to pass– just didn’t quite love the characters enough to feel I could pursue here.

10/17: Thanks so much for sending this to me. I can see why you’re so taken with it, and I found it truly original, but I didn’t fall in love. Please send me something else very soon, and I really appreciate having a chance at this one.

10/9: ****** of ****** sent a lettter saying he found “the vividness and imaginativeness of the writing delightful, and the characters he’s conjured are fascinating. Caleb Cross especially stands out. Brown, however, tries to cover too much in this novel, leaving the reader unsatisfied.”

10/3: Mr. Brown is such a delightfully quirky writer, and I really enjoyed the strangeness of this novel. I liked, too, the story within the story, of Julio and Jose and Las Mil y Una Noches.

But in the end, I just didn’t find myself responding to Caleb’s voice—which is what drives this—enough to think that I’d be the right editor, and so I’m going to have to decline. I’m sure you’ll soon find someone else who feels differently, so let me wish you and Mr. Brown every success upon publication. I’m sure you’ve got another hit on your hands, here.

9/25: I agree that Aaron Brown has some real talent – he’s clearly smart, knows the English language, and has a sense of humor. Sorry to say though, that his story failed to sweep me up and carry me away. I got lost in the prologue, then located again as I began to read. But my list is so small, and truly firing me up is so difficult.

9/21: You are an excellent writer and there are places that are laugh out loud funny–not an easy feat. However, this fell apart for me around page 150–I felt like the story should be more plot-driven. Along those lines, I really wanted the revelation about Bigger and ***** to feel as central to the book as Bigger and Caleb’s relationship. It ended up feeling like too much of a sidelight that came out late in the game. I think that my biggest overarching feeling about the book is that this is a guy’s book that needs a male editor. I just didn’t relate to Caleb’s anxiety or the friendship as much as I wanted to.

I do think that this will be fantastic with a little more tweaking, and I would be happy to refer it to a male editor here at *****.

So there I was, Salt Lake City 1997, final round of interviews for the Rhodes Scholarship. I shouldn’t have been there. The previous rounds had included enormously talented individuals from Harvard, Princeton, Yale and the like. As an example, one of the guys at the State level, a Harvard chap, had started a non-profit whose board members included Gorbachev and Jimmy Carter AND he was a nationally ranked squash player with something like a 4.0. There was NO way I should have made it this far. And yet, there I was. I now had a 1-in-4 chance of claiming one of the most prestigious academic prizes in the world and setting on a path that would undoubtedly lead straight to the White House and from there to various Nobel prizes and, probably, the establishment of world peace. All I had to do was charm a room full of former Rhodes scholars who were all highly accomplished judges and CEOs and college presidents and the like. I had one of the last interview slots and when my time came…how shall I put this? Have you ever laughed at the raving trailer drunks on COPS who scream incoherently whilst tearing their clothes and flinging random objects at the camera guy? I wish I’d been that well spoken. The point of revealing this little bit of misery from my past is–I took that loss hard. I won’t go into the psychological morass of why this particular rejection hit me like a bookie’s baseball bat to the knees of my confidence, but let’s just say I returned from SLC a bit of a mess. One of my professors, in an attempt to lift my spirits after the fact, told me: “if you don’t fail and fail dramatically on a regular basis, you’re not trying hard enough.”

Ten years later, I have pulled that statement out to lift my spirits more times than I can remember. Yesterday, upon receiving my umpteenth rejection, however, I found I didn’t actually need it. Instead, I just felt motivated. I just couldn’t wait to finish editing my second book and get it into the hands of my agent.

So, to better make sense of why I’m not a quivering mass of failure jell-o, I’ve decided to devote the next few entries to thoughts on rejection and even to sharing with you the rejections I’ve received. I’ll remove the names of the editors and publishers who’ve sent the rejections, because I bear them no ill will, but since I’m devoting this diascribe to showing the entire path to publication (however long it turns out to be), I need to share the stumbles right along with the victories.

So, stay tuned dear reader, and by the way…if you ever feel inspired to share some of your stories with the Pikes Peak Writers community through this thing that is still not a blog, send me an email. Defeats or victories. The coming week’s theme is all about rejection, but I’ll be moving on to a discussion of how to make a living being an unpaid, undiscovered writer after that.

Toodles!