60+ rejections + survey results + more whale stuff

Jun 20, 2021

May I recommend

Being rejected over and over and over and over again. This is a gross one. Maybe your stomach tightened up when you read that first sentence. It super sucks.

But Amy, you’re wondering, given your massive success - attaining middle age with a mortgaged home in Ottawa, a mid-level public service career and a mild morton’s neuroma on your right foot - what can YOU possibly know about rejection?

Well, aside from the men in my late teens, early twenties (ha ha ha, those brutal rejections -ha ha ha sob), my rejection expertise lies in this very writing career I am trying to foster.

My book (THE HONEYBEE EMERALDS March 2022) was rejected more than 60 times. The unpublished book before that about a coroner solving a mystery in an archival nitrate facility? Rejected 70+ times. The novel before that? The one about an archivist (I know) who finds a dead body squished up in the rolling stacks? Rejected 30+ times (rate is lower on this one, because the Internet wasn’t flourishing at that point, and I had to mail that sucker out and pay for postage). The one before that? The plucky florist who falls for a caddish businessman? Rejected 20 times.

So yeah, my writing career, up until January 2021 was a series of unrelenting rejections of material that I had poured my heart, soul and free time into. I told myself that I wrote because it was creatively nourishing and social (I love my critiquing group) and because I just had to find one person who said “yes” and my whole world would shift. Those things were all true (even the last one, which I thought was a comforting lie). While I had reasons for writing other than publication, the fact that I submitted things I deeply cared about and was proud of over 150 times, and 149 times, the world has come back and said, “Nah, I’m good,” was painful.

I have a tendency to downplay my accomplishments… sure I once ran a half marathon, but you should see how slow my time was; yes I got my Phd, but in kind of a weird way and in Belgium, so it doesn’t count; etc etc.

Guess what, though? When I finally got that precious, magical “Yes” on my book, that usual downplaying chorus didn’t kick in. Thanks to my vast experience of rejection, I was ready. When you’ve spent 20 years receiving a train load of “I didn’t connect with the material, best of lucks,” you don’t downplay what an accomplishment you’ve just, well, accomplished.

Instead, you feel like a mother fucking rockstar.

In addition to taming my self-deprecating mindset, my Rejection Training has had other payoffs. I’ve got Imposter Syndrome, the same as everyone else, and it turns out, there are so many ways to feel insecure in the literary world - I am not a good enough writer, I don’t have an MFA, I don’t know the right people, I don’t live in New York, my stories are dumb, I don’t have an agent, my jokes are not funny, I don’t deserve to be here…

Here’s where the Rejection Training comes in. If anything makes me a *real* writer, it’s not the beauty of my sentence structure or the sharpness of my character sketches; instead, it’s the fact that I can take a big fat Not For Me, Thanks right on the chin and just keep going.

Finally, all those rejections helped me figure out what I actually wanted. They showed me that even after deep disappointment you can continue to plug away. They taught me that 99% of the time it really ISN’T personal.

So, for all those reasons, I know that rejection can be good. As my father used to say, “it builds character.”

Tell me about your most crippling rejection in the comments below!

PROGRAMMING NOTE: Next weekend I’m blissfully Internet-free at a rustic cottage in the woods, where the Gin and Tonics will be strong and the lake, bracingly cold, so no newsletter.

You can always revisit the archives to laugh at old TikToks, if you need a fix!

Survey Follow Up

Guys - thanks so much for answering my survey. (I’ll leave it open for another week in case anyone else wants to respond)

Thirty-one of you answered (THANK YOU) and it turns out that you

like getting the newsletter on a weekly basis,
enjoy my recommendations the best,
some of you are downright hostile to the TikToks. One person wrote “TikTok means nothing to me.”
the most common reason amongst those who have never shared the newsletter with anyone is because it hadn’t occurred to them. I’d love to hit 100 subscribers by the end of the summer, so feel free to share and encourage people to sign up. You can SHARE via this button:

and they can SUBSCRIBE to get it delivered to their inbox via this button:

Follow up from last week’s whale story

Ask Me Anything - Q+A With The Guy Who Was Swallowed by a Whale

I am obviously going to to be keeping my eye on this story and this guy. He lived a pretty amazing life even before HE WAS SWALLOWED BY A WHALE

How did you get out? Were you able to see anything? What bad things could have happened inside which didn’t happen fortunately?
Eventually the whale managed to dislodge me by moving its head and tongue, I think.
Nope. Completely dark.
I could’ve suffocated, or drowned if I didn’t retrieve my regulator in time.

A good article on body acceptance

“How I stopped saying horrible things to myself.”

Flippity Flip being a human in a patriarchy is hard. We are all being policed and shamed about our bodies at all times. It is a radical act to step off the bullshit merry go round.

I am fat. It’s okay. You can say it. I can say it. Once I accepted that I was inherently, unconditionally worthy of love — and that this love and worthiness has nothing to do with my appearance and/or body but rather by pure virtue of being a human being — the word fat lost its power as an insult. I’m fat? So what! Throw a party for me if you care so much.