From Rejection to Restart

When I checked my email this morning, I found a rejection letter. The bad news is that it was correctly addressed to me – not spam, not meant for my next door neighbor, for me. The good news is that it’s a reminder I am sending work out. Yay! Two rejections so far this year means I’ve already sent out two more pieces of writing than I did last year. That’s progress.

What has progressed in your writing? Are you writing more pages? Is your revised edited version better than last year’s revised edited work? Are you writing down more of the ideas that come to you? Are you working regularly with a critique partner or beta readers?

Due to my homework in the master of creative writing program, I am trying a lot more kinds of writing than I ever thought I would. I wrote the beginning of a sci-fi story this week. It was crazy, funny, barely had any science in it and pushed me out of my comfort zone. I wrote some detective fiction last month. Never explored that genre before either. But the comments from my fellow students during the critique/workshop sessions are now more often, “I can tell this is your writing, Kitty.” I have succeeded in finding my voice. Yay!

Even though one more editor rejected my work, that doesn’t mean the piece was bad, or that I’m not a good enough writer. I made my teacher and my classmates laugh when they read about Fluffy the golden retriever who is actually a space ship. Some days, that’s all you need for the world to be a beautiful place!

So I told all my writing friends about my rejection to garner sympathetic support, brought some chocolate into the office for pity’s sake, and I finished reading my email. There I found two interesting articles on writing. (The math is already good – one bad email plus two good emails equals more positives than negatives today!)

One article is about new author Kiersten White and her journey to the publication of her first book Paranormalcy from HarperTeen. Her agent found Kiersten in the slush pile. Though the first book didn’t sell, Kiersten kept writing. One of the next books was Paranormalcy and the reviews are good! (At the end of this article, there are several links for other great articles. Guide to Literary Agents is a great web site if you haven’t visited it before.)

Another article I found today is How to Add Suspense to Your Novel. Author Elizabeth Sims explains the difference between a believable coincidence that has been seeded in earlier, and the kind of coincidence we always hear we shouldn’t write: Joe just happened to be walking by when… She talks about dynamic descriptions and the difference between a false clue and a red herring. While I don’t specifically write in the suspense genre, I like to have elements of suspense in my writing. Thanks to Elizabeth, I’ve got some ideas on how to improve some of those elements. Oh Happy Day!

By the time I finished reading those articles, doing some work, and eating enough Arnott’s Dark Chocolate Royals biscuits/cookies to give me a stomachache, I was feeling much better! Well, except for the stomachache. No worries. I have a 85% dark chocolate bar here to take the edge off. And I have some more writing to do!