Rejection: It happens to everyone!
The sad part about rejection letters is they can add up to authors feeling dejected from a thing they love most – creating stories and making readers feel. The thing is, everyone gets rejected and no author is alone. Long ago, I stopped letting rejection letters bother me and even let them fuel me to keep on writing. Rejection letters with constructive critique came valuable tools to move me along my writing journey. Slush pile form letters hit my own slush pile. But none of it stopped me from putting pen to paper.
As a therapist, I know that words matter. An author without a lot of confidence can quickly come to believe they don’t have the talent it takes to ever publish a book. That’s simply not true. Rejection letters come for many reasons. Maybe the genre or troupe was wrong. Maybe the submissions person was in a bad mood. Maybe the blurb wasn’t a good fit. It could be a number of things and isn’t always a reflection of an author’s work.
When I built Crazy Ink Publishing, LLC, it was important to me to try to take the stigma out of the word ‘crazy’ and to rebrand it as fun and creative chaos verses a word people should be afraid of. The same thing goes with rejection. Instead of seeing rejection and rejection letters as a bad thing, we can look at this word as one that unites us in this crazy (see what I did there?) journey called creating!
I want to see YOUR rejection letters. Post them, share them, and even wave them with pride. Because if you are being rejected, it means you are still trying! My plan is to create a wall of rejection letters so deep that no author can ever again feel they are the only one or even that being rejected is all that bad. Show me what you’ve got in this new group or email me your stories and letters at egeorge@antioch.edu. Or, just use the group as a place to remind yourself you are not alone. But whatever you do, don’t give up! #happywritingall #rejectedwestand
Join us here! https://www.facebook.com/groups/rejectedwestand
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