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.