No

So I woke up this morning and knew I had a mission. I need to find a God Pod.

You read that right. It's a long story, but suffice it to say that the church I attend has graciously tolerated all my social ministry initiatives. So . . . we've got a food drive, a diaper drive (do you know diapers are not covered by food stamps), a coat drive for needy families, and a Christmas toy drive all coming up. And with so many things I want to do, we can't store it all. So we need a pod. The pastor said, "Why don't we call it a God Pod" (and don't I wish I had come up with that?), and challenge the community to fill it. Great! SO many people are in need. Now where do I get a pod? I suggested trying to beg a local pod company to donate one for our use and we would give them free advertising. So guess what I get to do today?

Now, you would THINK since I am organizing all the above that it's not a big deal to go and find a darn God Pod. But . . . it means going into a store, asking for a manager, and then asking this stranger for a favor. Yes, what we're trying to do is a GOOD thing. But it's still one of those comfort zone things. But I'll do it. Because someone has to . . . because if you don't ask, you can't hear the word yes. Because, well, I don't think God is going to drop a pod on the church's parking lot.

But what is it about the anticipation of the word NO that freaks so many people out? Rejection in whatever form? I hate this part of social work. What's the expression? "The worst they can do is say no." For some people, it's just a shrug and an "oh well." For others, the word "no" is just devastating. Or maybe it's the slight humiliation we feel for putting ourselves out there and THEN hearing a no.

When you think of writing and publishing, the word NO is necessarily part of it. It's a rare writer who has heard nothing but yes their entire career. We put our writing out there. We hear yes or no. But few of us can shrug off the no. We give that NO so much POWER. We hear the NO as "NO and you really SUCK." "NO and you've wasted my time." "NO and you should quit this game."

I don't have any words of wisdom other than . . . no gets easier to hear when you don't "own" it and just accept that it's two letters. But I can't say that I don't fret over the NO word.

So . . . how do YOU handle NO? Inspire us today!

The Progress of Rejection

The short version to spare those who have heard it before. I wrote a novel in my early 20s. I sent a single query to St. Martin's Ruth Cavin (a legend). She requested the full. She kept it six months. I got a personal rejection saying my novel was too much a psychological thriller and not enough of a real "mystery" (which was what she was buying). It was a lovely rejection. She tossed in a compliment or two. I wasn't horribly crushed. Nonetheless, I didn't submit anywhere else. I also didn't complete another novel for a decade.

I kept writing. My reasons for not writing another novel and for not submitting were more about loving writing for writing's sake and not being terribly driven to get the thing published. I got several poems published, a few short stories published in literry magazines. I liked writing poems and short stories. But I just, for whatever reason, never had an idea for a full-length novel for a long time. FInally, I did come up with what I thought was an idea that I could write 300 pages about--and one I thought might actually sell someday. I started it. Midway through, I got Shiny New Idea Syndrome. I wrote Spanish Disco in six months. It sold in a couple of months. I've sold, including those not out yet and in the pipeline, about 25 novels since.

But I still get rejected. I shoot out proposals that don't sell. I start books that I never finish because I lose interest . . . I have massive doubts and highs and lows. But I do admit my first sale was not one of those agaonizing "I had 99 rejections and the 100th submission sold" stories.

However, I have LOTS of writer friends. And I see every sort of personal journey on the way to a sale. And I definitely think there is a progression of rejection. I think you go from form rejections, to personal rejections. You go from bland "not right for my list at the time" to comments and "I'd be willing to look at this again." I think you start knowing you're getting closer when no one tells your agent, "This writer can't write" and instead says, "They're a great writer, but I just don't love the book." Tangible and very real reasons for rejection start occurring--very often having less to do with the book's flaws and MORE to do with personal taste on the part of agents or editors.

And then you come to a different place. I think you come to a place where you start to see it as a business decision. A passion decision. You start realizing you can, indeed, write, but your book will not be for everyone. I have a work in progress where the mother is so awful, so wretched a person . . . that I know there are editors and people who just will not be able to enjoy the book or appreciate it or feel passionate about it. It's a book that may make a reader wince in spots. I can't write the book any other way, and so I am okay with whatever the outcome is.

So do you see progress as a writer with also progress of rejection? Do you think they're related?

What Are Your REALLY Afraid Of?

When I was a little girl, often my father's mother would babysit us. She was from Russia, and what I remember most was she made me drink tea. Before bed. Tea I hated the taste of. She also used to curl my long hair by wrapping it in newspapers (old technique . . . especially if you were poor, as she was after she came to America). She was a pessimist, but it was only much later that I understood why--she had been wealthy in Russia, the Communist Revolution destroyed everything she and her family had--they murdered people she knew . . . family, she came to America, penniless and alone, lying about her age (she wasn't even 18 yet), struggled under great poverty in the melting pot of the lower East side of NYC. What was to be optimistic about? So I don't think I understood her because I was just too young to grasp all that. She was a chronic worrier. But now, of course, I realize she had everything in the world to worry about. But what I most remember was she was TINY. I mean, teeny-tiny, maybe 90 pounds soaking wet. In baby-sitting parlance, this meant that, were a bad guy to break into our house, were a marauding band of crazed mutants to break into our house, she would merely be a fragile little snack cake for them. THIS I understood quite clearly in third grade.

Overactive imagination? Oh yes. After all, I've become a novelist. And one night, my sisters and I worked ourselves into a shrieking mass hysteria because we were certain a man was waiting outside our bedrooms to kill us. We saw his shoes there at the doorway, lurking there. We screamed, we cried. My grandmother was hard of hearing.

Now, the other part of this is my parents frequently partied until at LEAST dawn. Many a time, in later years, I'd leave for high school and they would be toddling in. One New Year's Party were threw lasted until January 3rd. So our mass hysteria lasted until amost dawn when my parents came home to shrieking children and a sleeping mutant snack of Russian origin. The serial killer outside our bedrooms was ACTUALLY a pair of my father's shoes. Just shoes.

So it is with writing fears. Recently on the blog, some people opened up about a fear of rejection. But that's not it at all. You don't fear the rejection letter. A rejection letter is nothing more than shoes. What you FEAR are the mutants. The mutants could be:

• The Mutants of Humiliation. Now that I have this awful rejection letter, SOMEONE out there knows how pathetic a writer I am. I am embarrassed.
• The Mutants of Reality. Now that I have this awful rejection letter, I have to face something I am not ready to about my writing--that I need to learn more craft, that I am not "ready" to send this out there even though I thought I was.
• The Mutants of Inner Tapes. Now that I have this awful rejection letter, that negative internal tape I love to play over and over and over again . . . is just louder and louder and louder. That I've wasted my time. That I am kidding myself. That my mother/high school English teacher/ex-boyfriend, etc. is right.
• The Mutants of People Who Know Better. You know them. The negative bloggers. The people who have given up. The people who tell you that you can't succeed.

See? A rejection letter is just a SHOE. It's the mutants. What are you REALLY afraid of?

The other half of this story is that in the light of day, the shoes weren't terribly frightening. They were JUST shoes after all. When you bring the mutants out into sunlight, as ANY zombie-movie fan knows, they will turn into a shriveling, burning mass of flesh and die. Mutants can't take sunlight.

LEARN what your REAL fear is. Then bring it out into the light. Then you can move forward bravely. You need not fear being a snack cake.

Thoughts? What are you REALLY afraid of?

The Drawer and the Mattress

When I finished my first novel, Spanish Disco, I shoved it in a drawer. I can even tell you which drawer. My grandmother's hutch, which I inherited, in the bottom drawer. I never told my parents I wrote a book. I never even told the father of my children I wrote a book. In fact, though I was in a writers' group, I think most everyone thought that was a little hobby or an excuse to drink wine and eat chocolate cake once every two weeks.

But I realize that my instinct to shove it in the drawer was rather like hiding my stories under my mattress--because that's what I used to do when I was a kid. I loved writing. I would write volumes of stories, and I can still remember sitting with a legal pad, writing my stuff out in longhand, LOVING the blank page that I was getting to fill up with something new (even then I had Shiny New Idea Syndrome). If I didn't like what I did, I'd crumple it in a ball and toss it across the room. And I would take it as some badge of honor, some fictional medal of angst, if there were dozens of wads of paper strewn around my room like snowballs after a snowball fight.

At first, I wanted to show people (parents, grandparents, aunts, cousins) what I wrote. I showed teachers. Everyone said I was a wonderful writer. But really, who are we kidding here? Aren't they supposed to say that? So after a while, I stopped showing my writing, feeling it was better left under the mattress, where it belonged to only me. Where no critics could reject it. Where it was safe.

But really? It was the Inner Critic I was probably hiding it from. If I showed it to someone and they hated it, then I might have to admit all this energy I was putting toward writing was for nothing. I'd have to admit I was a talentless hack and was doing nothing more than filling up paper. With stuff. None of it publishable. All of it better left in wads of papers in the circular file.

And then, I met my agent. And he asked about my writing in conversation, and I said I had a book in a drawer, and he said send me the book in a drawer, and it STILL took me a bit to send it, and he pestered me to send him the book in a drawer, and I did and he LOVED it, and it sold in a couple of months, and that was four years ago. Yup. Only four years ago from drawer to book. Well, actually, it sold almost six years ago, but was in production in while--and during that time I wrote my next and my next one.

And it still provokes anxiety, taking my stuff out from the mattress and the drawer. But it's part of my journey. I had to risk showing things to people other than the other two I drank wine and ate chocolate cake with. Though God knows I learned most of what I know about writing from that group. Still . . . risk? It was like jumping off a high wire not knowing if there was a net.

And it still hurts when things get rejected, or an editor doesn't like something or I find a snarky comment somewhere. Almost enough to make me go back to the drawer or the mattress. But I guess, with each book, it gets easier.

So tell me . . . do you hide your things in a drawer? Under the mattress? Do you hide from your inner critic or those ones out there somewhere? What are you hiding from?

Peace,
E