Rejection

I wrote a snarky little satire of a rejection letter as a bookend to my posting on acceptance, but I've decided I'm not yet ready to murder my fledgling writing career.

Instead, I'm going to talk about how much I actually like my pile of rejection letters. When I used to send out my work in batches of one or two, the wait for a response seemed interminable and the rejections were bitterly disappointing. Now I send out so many that it is, as my fellow Cow Skull Julie once said, kind of an empty day when there are no SASEs in the mailbox.

For someone like me, who is good at starting essays but not so awesome at finishing them, it's positive reinforcement to look at my pile of rejections (an inch thick now!) and realize that I've actually completed essays that I don't despair of entirely and that I'm doing the work of sending them out and getting them in front of editors. When I look at those letters these days, I see that I am keeping myself in the game.

Go me!