It’s blog chain time again and I’m next up in the chain gang. Soma, my predecessor, talked about rejection and how, regardless of what’s said, it’s always personal. Alas, I must disagree. To a point.

If you get a rejection letter back saying, “This blew dogs for quarters. Do us all a favor and never set pen to paper again,” then yes, I would have to say that’s pretty personal and that would probably be a rejection I posted on my blog, with name, to show just how much of an ass said agent was. But after reading a few agent blogs and getting their take on the slush pile, it’s really hard to sympathize with writers who just don’t get it.

If you do get it, and you understand that a pile of form rejections means that it’s something you’re doing wrong, then you’re good and I’m sure you’ll work to improve that. If you don’t get it and see a pile of form rejections as X number of agents overlooking your talent and they don’t know what they’re missing, I’m really not going to pity you when you get a rejection of the type above.

I’ve been writing since I was 9 and submitting since I was 17 (16?) and getting overwhelmingly rejected ever since, with a sprinkle of happiness in between. I never once, in all those years, wept over a rejection, nor did I become discouraged or throw myself a pity party. A rejection came in, another submission went out. If enough of them came back on one piece, I realized, as a lowly teenager, that the piece just wasn’t good enough and to stop submitting it, which I did. The harsh reality of publishing is not everyone is good enough to get published. Thanks to self-publishing, any schmuck with a word processor can publish his masterpiece and proclaim the fallacy, “I’m published!” but outside those delusions of grandeur, most of the writing out there really isn’t good enough.

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