There's battle lines being drawn.
Nobody's right if everybody's wrong.
Young people speaking their minds
getting so much resistance from behind

Tuesday, December 16, 2008

It's beginning to look a lot like rejection...

Just finished up a lot of homework kinds of things and was thinking of starting into rewrites of A History of Lightning when "I've got mail!"

The fine editors over at Goblin Fruit sent me a very nice rejection email for "Scrimshaw Man." Sent a thank you note (the rejection was very nice and I think it was close). I took a few rounds through the poem to see what I could refine. Deleted a word, added another word. And then I went to go look for resubmission while I pondered other edits.

That's when my brain sort of went, "sprung!" There was a fleetingly short burst of information across the synapses, a detailed plan of what I needed to do to find another market. Then blankness. The shoulders slumped. As I tried to recreate the process of resubmissions I didn't so much hit the wall of sleep as it came crashing in on me.

I've been burning the candle at both ends and having the emotions/expectations played to a limit for the past few days and it's caught up with me. Time to go to bed. Heck, I might even read a little (it's been over a week). Then go comatose until tomorrow morning when I need to get up even earlier than normal.

3 comments:

Rick said...

Hey, their loss, Steve. Good luck with getting back into gear.

Leaf, Branch, Bark & Root said...

Just keep sending stuff out and keep writing. Eventually, the right story will hit the right editor at the right time. I'll keep at it too. Be well - got your card - see you both in a couple weeks!

Steve Buchheit said...

Thanks guys. It wasn't the rejection that drained me. It just hit at the right moment. I started to load up Duotrope and another market list to find a new one, and my brain shifted from second to overdrive and over-reved. I had only experienced that a few times before. Faster than I could consciously process I had gone through the whole process for submission in my head. There was the sound of tires screeching, metal crunching and glass tinkling. At that point all the edits I was thinking about fled like scared rabbits and I got overwhelmingly tired.

So we'll get back to it tonight, as long as I don't have household duties (or at least too many of them).