Hello strangers,
We started this journey in media res. Time to play catch up!
On February 2nd 2019 I submitted my first short story to a literary magazine. It was a Saturday. I remember the bright glow of my laptop screen bleeding into the dimly lit coffee shop. It was evening, and the cafe was almost empty spare the owner and one or two other patrons. I remember staring at the Moksha submission form with my heart in my throat as I maneuvered my mouse pointer over the submit button.
One click. A click of hope. A click of naive exuberance and wishful thinking. A click that meant I thought my story was worth sharing. A brave click. One that launched my foray into the publishing industry.
My first rejection letter email came back exactly 10 days later, on February 12th. I stumbled upon the Rejection Wiki not long after. Lo and behold! My form email was a higher tier rejection!
What? Too exuberant over rejection? Look. If you can’t celebrate the small victories, what can you celebrate? Don’t get me wrong, I was bummed too. But I didn’t expect success. Hoped for it, sure. But even famous authors like Stephen King and Ursula K. Le Guin (RIP) were rejected at first. This is the rejection letter for Le Guin’s first novel, The Left Hand of Darkness.
This isn’t the post about rejection though. (That comes later; there will be stats!) This one’s about persistence. After I got that first form letter, I kept going. Researched another literary magazine. Made edits. Submitted again. And on and on. Failing means you’re trying and that was my goal for 2019. To try. Success would have been wonderful: and way too easy. Besides, this isn’t a storybook. One success isn’t a happily ever after, it’s a: now what?
My now what, along with short stories, was to take my current manuscript seriously. For most of 2019 I was progressing in fits and starts through the 4th draft of my work-in-progress like a children’s wind up race car, frequently running out of juice and flying off tabletops to crash to the kitchen tile below, until a stray thought like a children’s hand turned me upright and set me writing again.
And then I stumbled upon Pitch Wars.
It was August 27th 2019.
My manuscript was VERY unfinished.
The Pitch Wars deadline was 27 September 2019.
I decided to finish my manuscript and submit to Pitch Wars. (While on vacation, no less!)
I wasn’t tracking super closely at the time, but per a rough estimate, I wrote ~63,930 words between 27 August and 27 September. By the skin of my teeth (and on three hours of sleep and amounts of caffeine that should be illegal) I made the submission deadline for Pitch Wars.
Do I suggest this?
No.
Absolutely not. I do suggest Pitch Wars, it was a great half-step towards querying and the community was positive and supportive. But, you’re supposed to submit manuscripts to Pitch Wars that are polished. Was I polished?
It wasn’t a first draft, at least? BUT: my goal wasn’t really Pitch Wars success. Though it would have been wonderful to be a Pitch Wars 2019 mentee, the goal was to finish the manuscript. And in that, I was successful. Pitch Wars gave me the external pressure I needed to meet my personal goal. So, after running a victory lap for meeting my personal writing milestone I again asked:
What next?
The next step, for me, ended up being something that felt harder than writing 63,000 words in 30 days: asking for beta readers. Sharing the world I’d created, the characters I loved, the manuscript I’d been working on for *awhile* was abjectly terrifying.
I understand this is a strange paradox as you are reading this on the wide open internet. Why would a writer be scared of sharing their work? Don’t I want to share my stories? Of course, dear stranger! But fear and desire often coexist.
I did ask for beta readers (who could be reading this now 👀👀); and I’m still trying to get used to actually telling people I am a writer (hello Internet!) Shouting into the void has always been my escape; but, answering questions of “What’s new?” from friends and family with anything other than, “not much,” is still a struggle.
Since asking for beta readers, I’ve been self-editing my manuscript, researching literary agents, and learning about the industry while submitting the occasional short story to literary magazines. Oh! And of course I started this blog.
So now what?
In the words of the late great Robert Jordan, you’ll just have to read and find out. 🙂
-M