Sometimes it is all I can countenance even to consider submitting a piece of fiction for publication. You know, I always thought artists were sensitive people, but these days we’re told to have thick skins—not to take rejection personally. “I’m sorry, but I don’t like what you’ve spent hours and hours creating, honing, and polishing. It’s nothing personal.”
My day job is a professor at a nondescript college. I still do research now and again, and like my fiction it is generally rejected before somebody else picks it up and says its worth a look. Sometimes it is said even to be good.
I wrote a scholarly book some years back. I sent it around to publishers who didn’t like it for various reasons, and so it languished while I moved on to other things. Recently three publishers approached me about it, expressing an interest. Ah, editors! Ye are such a fickle breed!
Fiction, however, is far more personal. It is mined from deep within the mind, revealing aspects of the personality that no person who meets me in civil circumstances will ever know. Thus the necessity of a nom de plume, or perhaps more appropriately, a nom de guerre. Like in my story “Literary Ops,” each submission is a conflict. Only the reader wins.
I recently finished my fourth mature novel. I’m not even considering submission. Small presses, I know, are eager for material—each book I write should be a gift. Yet I’ve been turned down too many times to have the heart to try. Meanwhile, I’ve begun work on novels five and six. The remainder are lined up like jets waiting to land at O’Hare.
A brave soul indeed, who seeks to publish. We write what we know, and the patterns in our minds are formed and carved into the solid granite by repeated rejections. How does one know if one’s work is any good?
Over forty unpublished stories crowd my hard-drive, and tattered novels await someone willing to give them voice. All the while work demands far too much attention. I wait in the breadline of the unpublished. Yet fiction is all I need to live.
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