Killing Me Softly With OneWord: NO!
Rejection letters are the writers’ merit badge and other fibs
Rejection season is upon us.
Now is the time all those personalized queries you planted in early fall, reap scores of form letter rejections from agents and editors.
It begins in Sober October, so dubbed because it sounds better than The Month of Angst and Despair. And we writers love all the words.
Except “moist” which is universally hated for reasons any Freudian can explain.
The emotionally prepared writer will sweep aside those early standard-issue “no”s with utter confidence.
Rejection happens.
Refer to Submittable, QueryTracker, Duotrope, or your personally-designed spreadsheet to keep track of all your heart-breaking failures. Cry. It doesn’t help but you’re going to do it anyway.
To feel better and/or worse about your accumulation of rejections, know that the acceptance rate of an unknown writer at the most prestigious literary magazines such as The New Yorker, The Atlantic, or The Sun reliably hovers close to zero. Seriously, it’s usually less than one percent. Duotrope does the research and provides the stats so that the diligent writer can feel despondent in a precise mathematical manner.
