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Rejection
A while back I did an interview for Diabolical Plots. One of the questions was: If you could give just one piece of advice to aspiring authors, what would it be? And I replied with: Learn to handle rejection. Unless you are some kind of a genetic abnormality with an absurd talent for writing (in which case I hate you) you will have more disappointments than successes. Don’t let the disappointments sour you. Savor the successes. Now, I wholeheartedly agree with the advice I gave. Following through with it, is a different story. It can be difficult, especially now with email submissions where you might get a few rejections on…
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The Query Trigger
So I have a couple stories that have been ‘under consideration’ for close to a year by some respectable magazines that generally respond much sooner. Now the responsible thing for me to do is to query them and find out if the submission or the reply was lost in the ether. But I won’t do that. See I’m generally not a superstitious kind of guy. I regularly walk under ladders and kick (cross paths with) black cats and so on. The science degree makes that inevitable. But when it comes to query letters I am superstitious. Why? Because out of the dozens of query letters I’ve sent asking about the…
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The Writing Life
I have really been enjoying writing full-time from home(supported by some part-time gambling) but it has some drawbacks. This is a bit of a ramble, but bear with me. When I had the dayjob, I was a busy guy — between work and family obligations I was fighting for writing time. Days might pass without me being able to check personal e-mail or open the stack of mail on my desk or write a line or two. I was occupied. Often I forgot about the stories I had sent out and when story rejections arrived they were just a momentarily ‘darn’ and I moved on. I had a lot to…
