In the land of struggling writers, nothing is more terrifying than the concept of getting a rejection letter from someplace you submitted your work. At least, that’s how I feel about it – I am petrified by the whole process. You pour your heart and soul into a story, you pound at it until it hurts, and then just when you think it’s safe to feel good about things, you realize that you need to send your stuff out for submissions. You realize you need to listen to someone else evaluate your work. You realize that, in the end, the creative process is up for review by some editor somewhere who can decide whether or not your work gets published.
Hurts, don’t it?
Submitting my work is the most difficult thing I can imagine. I have stayed away from it, preferring instead to ‘hone’ my work. Really what I was doing was hiding, but I didn’t want to call it that. So yesterday, when I was busy being utterly ballsy about finishing my grad school application (more about that in next post) I decided to just get it over with. Get my first rejection letter – who cares! Just do it! And so I sent out my story. To hell with it! I know the work I sent out isn’t half as good as it should be, but there it goes. And if it gets rejected, well… at least the first one’s out of the way. Then, I can just keep going from there.
First one underway. Let’s see what happens.