Work to YES (Part I)

Take Charge of your Emotions

Getting your work “out there” opens you up to a lot of criticism, helpful or otherwise. We field a lot of negative feedback as we work our way up the learning curve. Turns out that our perfect little story is not so perfect after all. Worse yet, after we’ve spent days, weeks, and months in revision, no one cares. No one wants to read it anyway.

Six agent submissions and they all come back empty. Your writing career feels over before it has begun, right?

Okay, you are allowed x number (minutes, hours, a day) to work through the I-quit-and-I’m-never-going-to-be-a-published-author feelings. Let yourself wallow nice and good for a short while and then put it behind you. You have a plan. You lick the chocolate off your lips and you move on to the next item on the plan.

Because guess what? You don’t know it yet, but agent submission #21 is going to come back with a request for a full. If you quit at #15 or #18 you will never get to #21. Or, you go to a writer’s conference and pitch your project to an editor—and she gets it! She wants to see the full.

I really like this quote from The Writer’s Guide to Getting Published (from The Writer magazine):

As all of my rejections have taught me, it only takes one “Yes!” from one publisher to render all the no’s meaningless. – Joni B. Cole

So, if your feelings keep knocking you upside the head remember these key principles:

1. Know what your next step is for your current manuscript.
2. Always be working on that next manuscript. It’s like that old saying about not putting all your eggs in one basket. Keep producing.