How to deal with rejections from publishers...

If someone walked up to you and said being a writer is the easiest vocation in the world, what would you say? Personally, I would say they are talking as if they only have a wind tunnel connecting their ears. To create a masterpiece of forty thousand words or more (40,000 being a novellas and 55,000 or more a novel) takes unlimited time, creativity, an abundance of patience and support from family and friends, and most importantly, a love of words and the world they create once written.

Writing entails endless hours of writing out your idea, developing and embellishing details, characterizing your characters, giving them their own description, personality, and place in your story. I would go so far as to say that writing and creating a world in fiction, fantasy, or any genre, is the most difficult career in the world. For some, writing comes as easy as breathing. For others, writing can be a frustrating project. They may have the need and talent to write, yet the words never pour onto the page. Then there are still others, myself included, who experience a combination of both worlds. It takes an ingenious mind to create a story that has a beginning, middle, and end with hooks and prose. A story created may take months maybe even years without pay. One has to have a great love of writing as well as a mountain of patience and persistence to get published in this competitive world of ours.

In my own experience, writing poetry is how I started. It gave me a reason to write and fall in love with words, not just in poetry, but in writing novels for young adults. After graduation from high school, I, like several hundred other kids knew nothing of what I wanted to be, or do for a career. I settled down in a job running a receivables department in a major sign company for six years, then married, had two children and suddenly I was thirty three years old. Two years after the birth of my daughter, I took a course through Institute of Children’s Literature and graduated in July of 2003. It was during this writing course that I realized I had a desire to create and write. Since then, I have never looked back and wished that I had chosen a different path in life.

The hardest part about being a writer is not forming the story or words; rather it is the waiting in anticipation for a response in effort to mailing one’s manuscript or query letter. Through my own experience, my advice to the writers of today would be, keep yourself busy, whether it is writing a new book, article or entering contests, or simply living everyday life. If you choose the later, make sure you set aside time to write. Simply not writing or postponing a new writing project, will only amplify the time you are waiting to hear back from a publisher or agent, and it will cause you to go stir-crazy. It doesn’t matter if you have not been published or if you are waiting for a response from your submittals. If you tell the world you are an author or writer, you must write, write, and write!