>Getting good at rejection

>I have never been all that great at rejection. Perfection, I like. Rejection, not so much. If I can’t do something perfectly, I’d just as soon not do it at all. I’ve done pretty well over all with my anti-rejection philosophy, but I’ve known for some time that once I finished this book, the ensuing agent-search-and-rejection process would be rough and painful.

I’ve done better than I thought – not even one meltdown crying spell to date – but I have to say, it’s quite the learning experience. In school, if you work hard enough, you get an A. In agent hunting, you’re entirely at the whim of that particular agent’s time constraints, personal preferences, and whether or not her snotty nosed kid put her in a bad mood that morning. It’s completely uncontrollable… and I DO NOT LIKE uncontrollable. You just have to do your best work and keep putting it out there again… and again… and again.

Today I got my fourth rejection. To date: One form rejection, the kind where they don’t even bother to write your name at the top. One “this isn’t for me”. One “this work has merit, but isn’t for me right now”. And one “you are talented, and this is quite a commercial concept, but after much thought I’ve decided not to go with it”.

ARRGH. And then there’s the fact that it takes literally months to receive most replies.

I’m not discouraged (yet), and I realize that this is part of the process. “Paying your dues”, they call it. Wow. I thought I was paying my dues when I spent three years of my life throwing pencils at the computer screen. But I know I can’t give up; I’ve worked too hard for that. I’ll just keep paying those dues. And hope that one day they return the favor.

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>Girl, thirty-one

>Today we went to see “Julie and Julia” with my parents. It was a good movie; not anything over the top, not anything extraordinary. Just a girl with a dream, living life the best way she knows how. She was a girl a lot like me. No less than three times during the movie, I got poked in the ribs, patted on the knee, or pointed at, all because the things she was saying were things that I say, or the things she was wishing were things that I wish.

Here’s the premise of the story. Girl, thirty years old, with a husband and a cat, has half finished novel and an awareness that her life at thirty is not at all as she planned it. She was supposed to be a published author. She was supposed to be successful. She was not supposed to be living above a pizzeria. 

Meanwhile, here’s my story. Girl, thirty-one years old, with a husband (the cat kicked the bucket), has finished novel and an awareness that her life at thirty-one… well, you get the picture. 

It was a neat thing to see how the things in her life came together. She found her emotional center with the help of a Julia Child cookbook, a kitchen roughly the size of a telephone booth, and a blog. In my case, I can say with absolute certainty that Julia Child will have no part of my future. I have no interest in steaming a live lobster, deboning a duck, or making a jello mold out of the meat juice from a cow’s hoof. (Blech.) But that’s all right, because the point is still the same. You just keep doing what you’re doing, you don’t give up, and you try new things, because amazing things can and do happen every day. Sometimes they happen in big ways, and sometimes in small ones, but they happen.

And even if they don’t, at least I don’t live in a 900 square foot apartment above a pizzeria in Queens. There’s always that.

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