So, Your Baby Has Been Rejected!

Veteran Grip writer Regina Carlysle is here today filling in for Dakota Rebel who is out dealing with a family situation this week. The rest of the Grip crew would like to thank Regina, and send our best wishes to Dakota and her family.

Rejection, huh? Hey, I know a little bit about that and if you’re a writer, it’s something most of us have to learn to live with. Rejection happens in the business. From a logical perspective, we know a publisher is a business and they are looking for things that are right for them but try telling that to a writer. A completed manuscript is your BABY. You’ve conceived it. You’ve nurtured it. You want to see it spread its wings and fly. We want everyone to love our baby as much as WE do. It’s only natural.

The thing is, not everyone is going to see the beauty of your baby the way you do and this can lead to rejection.

I wrote for fifteen years before making my first sale so the topic of rejection is something with which I’m vastly familiar. In those days, we didn’t have the option of internet publishing. It just wasn’t there. If you sought publication, your only alternative was with the giant publishers in New York and we ALL know how hard it is to land a contract with them. That doesn’t necessarily mean your work SUCKS, it just means they are overstocked with authors or the genre you’ve subbed to them.

In the end, it’s not about rejection so much as how you handle it. We all face it from time to time and yes, everyone can say…don’t take it personally but, dang it, it’s hard not to. I normally give myself a day to mope and whine. That’s it. As a writer, it’s important to keep going. Have a work in progress going at all times. So when those rejections come, dive back in. Don’t start second guessing your talents and just know that SOMEWHERE is a publisher who will love it. Immediately send the rejected manuscript elsewhere then go back to the work in progress. In other words, keep plugging, keep typing, keep generating ideas.

Check out Spanish Topaz by Regina Carlysle, released TODAY from Ellora's Cave.

Hero

She is pregnant. He had just saved her from a fire in her house, rescuing her by carrying her out of the house into her front yard, then he continued to fight the fire.

When he finally got done putting the fire out,

he sat down to catch his breath and rest.

A photographer from the Charlotte , North Carolina news-

paper, noticed her in the distance looking at the fireman.

He saw her walking straight toward the firefighter

and wondered what she was going to do.
As he raised his camera, she came up to the tired man who had just saved her life and the lives of her babies and kissed him just as the photographer snapped this photograph.

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Time?

Time Managment is not my forte. Not even close. In fact it is probably the single largest factor in the smallness of my paychecks. Scheduling, making lists, sticking to them...I know, at least in theory how to do these things, but they still never seem to happen. About the only way I can really motivate myself to maximize my output is with some sort of external deadline. I can write a 50,000 word book in two weeks. I've done it. So why did a 65K book take me a year? Who knows?

I am lucky enough to not have a regular out-of the house job anymore. My kids are teens, old enough to feed themselves, and my father who lives nearby absorbs a lot of the chauffering duties. I am convinced that all of us benefit from this arrangement, so I don't feel too guilty about it. But like any other person who works at their dining room table or couch (I don't have a desk--nowhere to put it) I find myself at the beck and call of family. My friends know better. Besides, most of them have real jobs. I try to sneak in a couple of hours a week doing exercise classes at the local pool, but then a one-hour class ends up taking three by the time you get ready and get home. Some days it's easier to "forget."

Balancing promotion and writing is probably the most difficult knife-edge to walk in this crazy business. I freely admit, I haven't found the right mix yet. Chats are time-consuming but necessary, and so, IMHO is the occasional "water-cooler" conversation with writer friends. That's necessary for my sanity. Writing is a lonely business with lots of emotional highs and lows. If I didn't have a chance to talk to others who understand, I would truly go nuts. Then there are blogs. Many of my friends manage them every day. I have trouble with once a week. And then there's MySpace (have one) and FaceBook (don't have one) and all those other things that eat, eat, eat away at our precious writing time. Today, for instance I have two all-day chats on loops, and another tomorrow. The exposure is great, but OY! I have three WIP's and am getting nowhere on any of them.

These and other great de-motivator posters are available at: http://www.despair.com/

Happy Mother's Day!

Sunday Wrap Up

Erotica is simply high-class pornography; better produced, better conceived, better executed, better packaged, designed for a better class of consumer.
~Andrea Dworkin

The difference between pornography and erotica is lighting.
~Gloria Leonard

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Happiness is nothing more than good health and a bad memory.~~Albert Schweitzer

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