“…I may freely address you as ‘pissmidget’”
It’s summer, I don’t have to go back to full time teaching until the fall and in between the projects on my to do list for this time off (garden work that will never happen, filling out the paperwork for becoming an American citizen, brushing the dog, planning for lessons, watching bad TV) I thought I would do some writing. However, my motivation to put words on paper plummeted to the lowest low when Monday’s mail brought two rejection letters. Scott, Shira, and Sam have already “barked” on the subject and I don’t have anything to add other than that this video cheered me up. Here’s Irish comedian Dylan Moran as the main character in the TV series Black Books reacting to a recent rejection letter.
What do you do to cheer yourself up after one of these missives show up in your mail or inbox?
Sometimes I try to think of reasons the rejection is actually a good thing. I didn’t really like that journal anyway, I’ll tell myself. Or now I don’t have to contact them when my poem is accepted by another journal. Yes, self delusion seems to be the best remedy.
I’m usually very good at self delusion. I’ll add more practice of that to my summer to-do list.
Drink.
I don’t really do that but it might be a good idea.
Honestly what I do is open them up and stuff them in the top left drawer of my desk. Then in a few days or weeks, I’ll pull them all out and add the info to my submission lists (my spreadsheet is too hard for me to read) and resubmit work. I start at the top tiers of magazines and I’m ready to send all my work to high school magazines, I think. Though most of them only accept work from current students. I can always get around that with some fancy computer hacking, etc.
You have a spreadsheet? A submission list? That sounds very organized, I should probably do something like that because eventually the IRS will start asking me if I ever submit anything that justifies all the tax write-offs I enter into Turbo Tax every year.
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