Rejection Collection

Source

It is beginning to look like winter is finally loosening his stranglehold here in Southern Ontario. We're hovering around zero degrees centigrade right now, but I'm seeing double digits for later in the week. It's sunny and bright today, and that insane week of overcast, crappy weather we just had is finally over. I am happy to see the sun, but inside I'm feeling like I've been worked over by fifty angry chimpanzees wielding bags of gravel.

What, weather? Affect my mood? Why do you ask?

Also, right now that spate of submissions I managed to get out over the last six weeks is starting to bear fruit: the stinky, rotten fruit of rejection. This is nothing to be upset about (I tell myself earnestly): it's par for the course and a direct result of all those lovely submissions I made. Logically, this is true. Emotionally, I take rejection in all sorts of ways. If I'm on top of my game, it's a shoulder shrug and a figuring out where else I'm going to submit that piece. If I'm feeling like I've recently been worked over by fifty angry chimpanzees wielding bags of gravel, it can range from kind of frustrating to downright depressing. Today I'm on the hunt for a couple of pro markets for orphan short stories, but I'm also looking for inspiration. Here are some nice articles on submitting like a maniac and why rejections are a good thing:

Alex Keegan on rejection: "I eat rejections like Popeye eats spinach. You can too." An oldie but a goodie.

Milo James Fowler offers some wisdom from Mr. Bradbury on fighting the good submission fight.

Children's writer Ellen Jackson writes about the relationship between rejection and opinion: "Stories are like people - imperfect and flawed. If your work is competent, some readers [and editors] will hate it, some will like it.

On the flipside, Creative A over at Headdesk makes some excellent points about the dangerous nature of praise and the need for writers to stay objective.

I hope you all are submitting like maniacs and adding to your own rejection collections, not to mention picking up the occasional or not-so-occasional publication.

You Show Me Yours, I'll Show You Mine! January 3rd

Boggers Sarah (Falen) Ahiers of Falen Formulates Fiction, Hannah Kincade of Musings of a Palindrome, and Summer Frey of And this Time, Concentrate! are hosting a celebratory post NaNoWriMo 2010 Blogfest on January 3rd.

Presenting...

The deal: on January 3rd, 2011 we all post up to 500 words excerpted from our 2010 NaNo Novels.

Sign up here at And this Time, Concentrate! and join in the fun.

Time Part 1

I’ve been thinking lately about time: how we use it, how it uses us. How it continues to move, even if we don’t use it. How we think about it in terms of bankability: I’ve got two hours, therefore I can do x amount of actions. As if having time were the only factor involved in our capacity to get things done.

All of these concerns about time and how to get things done are of essence to a writer. If you don’t spend some of your time putting words on paper, then it’s pretty difficult to lay claim to the name. At least it feels that way to me.

But I guess one of the most relevant questions about time and writing is, how much time do you need to write?

There are many writing advice guides that will tell you that all you need is fifteen minutes or half an hour of writing every day. This advice is helpful at the beginning. Indeed, an academic version of one of these guides, Writing Your Dissertation in 15 Minutes a Day by Joan Bolker, was one of the golden keys that allowed me to get through my PhD.

These books all sing the same song: just begin. Do one page of writing. Three pages of stream of consciousness whatever. Squeeze it in between laundry and making dinner, between dinner and bedtime. Get up half an hour early, get into bed fifteen minutes before your usual time. Grab a notebook: any modest spiral bound will do. You don’t need a special pen. Just whatever you’ve got lying around.

The thing to realize about these guides is that they are lying to you. Fifteen minutes a day is not enough time to write, if writing is what you want to do.

You know what fifteen minutes a day of writing is? Or half an hour? Or three pages first thing in the morning?

These little scraps of time spent writing are the gateway drug to wanting to be a writer. Start with your cute little journal pages. Get into the habit of writing your stream of consciousness here’s-what-I’m-thinking-about stuff every day. The next thing you know, you’ll be scrounging around for an hour to spend with your writing. On the weekends, you’ll start thinking about Sunday afternoon in a whole new way. You’ll shift your responsibilities around. You’ll cut back on sleep. Maybe you’ll do what I did, and start thinking about whether you can quit your job.

And worse yet, before you know it, the ideas will start to come, because writing daily – no matter what you’re writing – will call down the muses. They’ll start fluttering by your ear when you’re doing other stuff, “important” stuff. They’ll wake you up at night. And they’ll demand that you tell their stories. To tell them well, you’re going to have to practice writing. You’ll have to practice hard. For that, you’ll need more time.

Great oceans of time that you can dive into and swim around in. You’re going to need all the time in the world so you can dream and think and plot and plan. And space – you’ll need that too. You’re going to need to tell everybody to back off.

You’ll do what you have to do. You’ll find the time. Great oceans of it, or at least small lakes. And you’ll make a space for yourself, somewhere in the world, whether it’s a room in your house or a corner of the library or a table at a coffee house.

Once you have that, once you give yourself time, let me tell you, it gets so good. You can relax, because you know that in the course of a day you’ll be sitting down to do some writing. Whatever issues you’ve got with your story, you’ll be working them out. Whatever questions you have about how to proceed, what makes good writing, how to make your writing better, or the mechanics of a good novel, you’ll start to figure out. Because the only answer to these questions lies in sitting down and writing it out. If you want to be a writer, you have to give yourself time.

On External Validation

I've been chatting with some folks on Stringing Words about organization. I am by no means a naturally organized person. One of my biggest issues has been fighting chaos in my physical environment. I don't like it when things aren't clean, but I do have a high tolerance for disorganization and a moderate tolerance for filth. My partner is similarly disposed. It seems that there is always something else to do, no matter how much of a disaster area our home is.

In the last few months, I came across a solution to my issues with keeping organized: the FlyLady. I mentioned her and her system as a way for one of the other Stringers to deal with clutter, and met with a neutral / negative reaction that gave me cause to think about why I love the FlyLady so much.

To me, the FlyLady is pure magic. Signing on to her email newsletter was one of the best things I've ever done for myself. Basically, she and her team send out a constant, enormous stream of email messages that give you a structured routine to follow so that the dishes get done, the toilet gets cleaned, and you are coached in numerous ways to create a gradual, general increase in the level of cleanliness of your home. I can totally see how some people would find the system and its accompanying barrage of messages annoying, but I totally needed a generous Southern lady to cajole me into using my vacuum.

Talking about the FlyLady with others has led me to an insight about how I operate. It's something I already sort of knew, but it's always good to have reminders of who you are and what turns your crank.

I am totally susceptible to external validation. Which is another way of saying that my primary motivators come from the outside, and not from within.

That fact is part and parcel of being an extrovert. Where introverts are less likely to put it all out there, I have a hard time keeping it all in. Where introverts look to their inner selves for cues as to how things are going, I'm always looking for gold stars.

I would never say that one way is better than the other, although I'm extreme enough in my extroversion that I don't pretend to understand the inner workings of introverts and their self-motivational capacities.

All of this is to say, simply, that now that I've been reminded of this fact, I plan to use it to brainhack myself. The more cookies, treats, A plusses, gold stars, and pats on the back I can arrange to get, the better I'll perform, I'm sure. These don't have to be personal at all. When the FlyLady writes in her e-newsletter that she's proud of me, I know she's not really talking to me (exactly). But I still get a little thrill from it.

This inner gold star collecting princess will, I think, will be a major key to getting stuff done over the next little while.

So even though I am not really big on New Year's resolutions, with the turning of the calendar year and the beginning of a sort-of new decade, I did make some big plans for my writing, set some word count goals, and began to think about getting (even more) serious about my creative career.

Over on Stringing Words, the powers that be have set up yearly and monthly word count and project threads. Lots of people, myself included, have established lists of projects we hope to complete, things we'd like to see happen, and raw word counts we'd like to achieve. The site gives us a place to keep track of all these plans, and to note success as we meet them. Perfect for my inner princess.

I guess the lesson here is that knowing what makes you tick is useful information. Once you figure that out, you can hook a carrot to your stick and head off toward the horizon of your choice.