doggedness
Sep. 23rd, 2003 04:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyTwo turnips (short stories) lobbed out.
Leaving me with my three Weird Sisters, three 10 k traditional horror novellas that nobody loves but me. *sniff*
On the upside, that's ten stories out and circulating, which is about five more than I could even imagine when I started submitting things back in 2000. (My three-year anniversary of submitting short fiction is October 5th.) And both those original submissions have sold. Huh. I guess that's a good sign.
Submitting short stories requires complete estrangement from the ego. That's the thing that's hard. You can't let it knock you on your ass when something gets rejected, even if it's the best thing you've ever written and the editors are all cretinous slobbering hyenas. (Which is how the more primitive levels of my psyche react to each and every rejection letter.) There's a rhythm to it, a kind of beat of not-thinking that's really really easy to lose. And once you start thinking, it's a very short and very slippery slope to that Eeyorish state of Why bother? No one will buy it. No one cares that it's your life's blood on the page. Probably they'll just make paper hats out of it and laugh. How Like Them, and you might as well be eating thistles.
It's also true that this particular tango gets easier with practice. But you have to keep dancing.
Leaving me with my three Weird Sisters, three 10 k traditional horror novellas that nobody loves but me. *sniff*
On the upside, that's ten stories out and circulating, which is about five more than I could even imagine when I started submitting things back in 2000. (My three-year anniversary of submitting short fiction is October 5th.) And both those original submissions have sold. Huh. I guess that's a good sign.
Submitting short stories requires complete estrangement from the ego. That's the thing that's hard. You can't let it knock you on your ass when something gets rejected, even if it's the best thing you've ever written and the editors are all cretinous slobbering hyenas. (Which is how the more primitive levels of my psyche react to each and every rejection letter.) There's a rhythm to it, a kind of beat of not-thinking that's really really easy to lose. And once you start thinking, it's a very short and very slippery slope to that Eeyorish state of Why bother? No one will buy it. No one cares that it's your life's blood on the page. Probably they'll just make paper hats out of it and laugh. How Like Them, and you might as well be eating thistles.
It's also true that this particular tango gets easier with practice. But you have to keep dancing.
