Crushed - Again

I don't know why, but every time I receive an actual rejection letter, it crushes my heart beneath a jackbooted heal. Not one of the form letters that I could almost, but not quite, wallpaper a room with.

Those are easy.

Those mean that no one actually read my brilliant opus. It is, of course, brilliant, in the same way that every parent's child is beautiful, talented, gifted and of above-average intelligence. Those rejections are a simple cog in the wheel of the machine for writers who don't have an agent or have never before been published. An automated car wash has more personal attention than these rejections do to actual efforts and I treat them as such:

A necessary evil that uses up a precious resource in order to not offend others with too much grime and dirt.

But personal rejections - that's a different Balrog altogether. That stands on the Bridge of Khazad Dum and screams, "You shall not pass!"

Alright, that allusion is all wrong, but I'm a rejected author and now you can see why!

Perhaps it's a mark that my skills as a storyteller are growing to the point that I am now actually receiving rejections on the basis of my work, rather than as just a matter of course for some kid no one has ever heard of. Or perhaps, as I've always suspected, I'm more of a one-note one-line writer, rather than someone who has the talent and ability to maintain a reader beyond the second page. Someone who can come up with an interesting opening, like, "People think they want to meet an angel, but they really don't." But then blathers on and on about nothing in general for another 70,000 words.

Stephen King, in a recent Entertainment Weekly article mentioned, only in passing, that he has mediocre talent which he parlayed into piles of cash. I agree completely with him. That gives me hope, since I've always considered him something of a kindred soul, if only from the view point that we both write words and mostly use English. (Try reading King's book 7 The Dark Tower without reading any of the previous books, and see if you can wade through his crafted slang and terminology. Go ahead, I'll wait here.) I've always considered him in the ranks of David Gemmell (RIP) and Michael Crichton: second-rate talents with the first-rate gift of gab. But to have him actually state it, and in print no less, gives me hope. You know what you're getting when you pick up a King, Gemmell or Crichton book, and you have this unsigned contract that he will provide a modicum of action and thrills that will entertain for a good eight to ten hours of sustained reading without actually causing you to think or react too much.

I'm all for that kind of escapism writing. So much so that I fancy myself a teller of those kinds of tales. Like King, I am totally willing to sell out my mediocre-talent for a little of the green stuff and the thrill of seeing my name underneath my title with an actual publisher (no vanity publishing, thanks).

Alas, again, this is not to be.

But this is not an attempt to gain pity. I just found it remarkable that after twenty some years of submitting admittedly immature and sophmoric works, that one more rejection still had the power to stomp my hope into bantha fodder.

The upstroke of this, though, was that when I did the "thank you so much for your effort" response and requested a little feedback, the agent insisted she had no time for a critique.

With a wolfish grin, that suggests she didn't even read it, and I'm back on the cog of the machine. I don't know why that pleases me no end, but it certainly does.

We writers would prefer a rejection without having been read, than a rejection based on the work itself. Yes, we're that weird.