And here we are, at last…
Now, you guys have been reading this little story of mine over the past two months. For me, though, it was a journey of literally years, sending off stories, waiting months for a rejection. I clawed my way from blank form letter rejections to personalized editorial comments…and then found myself tumbling back down the hill to this. Not much more than another blank form letter. Just some initials. No comments to build off of; no name to use in responding.
Was I depressed at this point? Yeah, I was. I’m not going to sugar-coat it. At the time, I thought I was slowly but surely pressing forward to publication, only to find that damn stone getting away from me, just like Sisyphus’s.
Sometimes you do your best and you get a glimpse at what’s ahead and you stumble and fall anyway.
Look, if I were making all of this up, I sure as hell would have rewarded you guys with a better ending than this one. To go through this and end with a whimper? Ugh. I don’t like it, either. But it’s what happened.
Except…
Well, I never did get published by the Missouri Review. And that’s okay. Shortly after that last rejection, I was published by Glimmer Train, another publication I’d been aiming at for years. And right around the same time, I decided that maybe short stories weren’t my bag. So I started working on a novel. I didn’t know what it was called yet (on my hard drive, it was just “Untitled YA Project”), but I already knew that the main character would be named Fanboy.
But TWiR isn’t about success. It’s about rejection. Next week…more rejection!