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!