Life's Sentences

*May your pens be full of ink and your liquor cabinet full of tequila*

~Sarah Proverb

This post is inspired by my wonderfully supportive husband who said “You should blog about that!”

My husband recently completed his Master’s degree in a highly competitive field. We live in an area of the country where the market happens to be overly saturated by qualified graduates. To top it off, budget cuts are constantly eliminating positions at universities and state institutions, making job prospects even more bleak. Needless to say, he deals with a lot of job-related rejection, but he perseveres because he knows that being an archivist is his dream.

Becoming a published author is my dream, but being a writer means you have to grow a tough skin or else the constant rejection will destroy your desire to write.

Therefore, I have developed a strategy for coping with rejection.

I call it “Moping and Margaritas”.

Here’s how it works: As I continue on the long journey of querying, revising, and tracking my submissions, it is inevitable that I will receive many rejections. Every time I receive a rejection, I allow myself one day of moping about being a hack and a failure, and then end the day with a margarita (my favorite alcoholic drink, but feel free to substitute it with whatever floats your boat). After I’ve finished my margarita, I give myself a pep talk and then I force myself to GET OVER the rejection and move on. Usually, this involved submitting more queries and adding more agents to my list.

Last week, I received three form rejections from agents (who I thought were perfect fits for my MSS) ON THE SAME DAY! I’m not going to lie, it hurt a lot. To put it into perspective, imagine getting punched in the mouth, then having someone pull out those loose teeth. Then you scald your tongue. Yeah. Like that.

So I moped around, avoided even looking at my writing, and had a margarita with dinner.

I can’t allow myself to dwell on rejections for more than one day because that’s writing time I can’t get back. If I’m too depressed to write, then I’ll never finish another project, never find an agent, never fulfill my dream.

So I encourage others to feel dejected, study that feeling, learn from it, and then get back to writing!