In my last post I bragged about having overcome the sting of rejection. I all but claimed the I was the Dread Pirate Roberts, and rejection was my iocane powder.
Remember that story I spit shined and sent back into the world to take some cuts? Yeah, it took some cuts. Immediate and merciless cuts.
When you submit a story and it takes a few months to get rejected, you get this idea that maybe you made it through a few rounds before it was tossed out of consideration. But when you get rejected with 72 hours there are no such happy delusions. They had zero interest. They would have thrown it over a shoulder if they weren’t reading it on an iPad. They may have rolled their eyes at my pitiful writing and probably didn’t get past the first page. But I definitely have no talent and should stop bothering these poor people by pretending otherwise.
Most of the time writing is my passion and I know I will always write, regardless of whether I have any success with publishing, because I must. It is and has always been the way I make sense of the world.
But sometimes writing is a second job that I took on which pays only in disappointment. And sometimes I feel well paid.