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writing about writing

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Ho hum, two rejections in the past week. But never mind. Stephen King said in that book about writing that you haven't really earned your stripes or learned your craft if you haven't got... er, a certain thickness, some inches anyway... of rejection letters on a spike on your desk. But hold on! All my recent ones have come by email! They have no physical thickness! I will never fill up the spike on my desk and never succeed! King Has Said It So It Must Be True.

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Print them out, and spike 'em.
Print them several times, on thick paper. That way, success will come all the sooner! :-)

Perhaps what he means is that the rejection letters must collectively be the size of a book. Thus you merely need your rejection e-mails to collectively be the length of a manuscript (originally mistyped as “menuscript”, which sounds horribly geeky).

Alternatively, print out the e-mails and stick them on a spike. But this strikes me as a waste of paper.

What’s your target for the number of rejections you receive this year?

There are better things than that you can do with a big spike on your desk, if you've got one.

Why not compile your rejection letters into a book (printing them if need be).

Then publish that...

NEVER GIVE UP!

Pay no heed to rejection letters - They're gonna happen 95% of the time to ANYONE. Keep at it!

Send them back! Reject their rejections!

My own analysis of the way these things work suggests to me that the whole concept of authors being picked up from unsolicited submissions is mostly a myth in the modern world. Again and again I find that if you managed to find a sufficiently detailed biography of an author there's frequently some special detail - however minor - that means they didn't quite just send out manuscripts and get accepted.

And on the rare occasions when a hit author is found in that way the whole thing's more like a lottery win than a triumph for self-evidently great literature.

Spike your computer! Like that thing that guy from The High Life does in Goldeneye.

We'll never reject you though. (Unless you specifically ask us to.)

Mr King is clearly stuck in the 20th century. What you ought to do is get a modelling program, build a hypercube, texture each face with your rejection letters, and then pile them all up in a 4 dimensional space - taking the process into a whole new dimension!

Or, umm, perhaps not.

By the way, where magazines are concerned, I don't know if you've seen this? (the magazines list is about half way down the page). Also, the link I was wittering on about at lunch is here.

And if I end up eating anything else with wishes in it, I'll save one for your next (current?) story submission:-)

I like the idea of a spike of rejection letters.
But I also like recycling the mail that I don't want.

So here's my solution - spike 'em and put them in the smallest room. Rejection letters - soft, strong, and thoroughly absorbant!
;-)

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