Getting Back in the Saddle: Relearning to Try

I mentioned in my piece last week that, for some reason, in times of great distress, my normal dower outlook gets awful cheerful. "Carpe diem," I suppose. Such is my optimism that recently, after not doing so for nearly two years, I started submitting short fiction to magazines again. 

Some Twitter followers saw me announce this a few weeks ago, in my normal sad-sack style:

Now some of you might well questions why it is that I started doing this because of what we're all facing. The answer really is twofold.

Life, of course, is always riddled with uncertainty. None of us know even if we will wake up tomorrow. When faced with the threat of a pandemic--one we were so underprepared for at that--however, that unsettling feeling of uncertainty only grows. That said, I've always found a sense of liberation in times of uncertainty. I figure, I could start showing the symptoms of a fatal case tomorrow; if that were to happen, I'd at least like to know that, before I went, I made yet another attempt to achieve the life I long for: the writer's life. Rather than being cowed, I want to go out knowing I was still in the preverbal trenches, fighting the good fight--as it were.

I also took the initiative in order to overcome a slow-growing fear that I'd developed starting in 2018. For my constant readers, you'll know that 2018 was the year I finally sold my first piece of writing (I still have the voided check, with a hand-written memo next to it commemorating the date). After that first taste of success however, a fresh feeling of uneasy began growing in me. With a small number of publications to my credit--in nonfiction that is--I'd finally had some success, but with that success began to grow a fear of the dreaded rejection letter. I'd finally achieved the validation every writer seeks and didn't want to risk losing it again. 

We must, however, do the things we're afraid of, for it is often the things we fear that, in the long run, will turn out to be the most important.

So, I submitted a piece. Sadly my prediction came true just this last week:

Getting the rejection letter, however, didn't feel terrible though. Instead, strangely enough, it felt good. Receiving a rejection letter is in fact a badge of pride; pride from the fact that its very existence proves you tried. You made an effort to make progress in your field of endeavor. Effort is effort.

Receiving a rejection letter after so long, as well, retaught me something very important: getting a rejection isn't the end of the world. It also doesn't signify that the work itself is bad. It simply means that, for whatever reason, the story didn't appeal to the editors. Form rejections are irritating in that way because you aren't given a reason, but with so many magazines receiving so many stories all the times, it is simply too taxing on their already overly taxed time for them to give feedback. 

When you get a rejection, there are only two things someone like me can do. A) I can trunk the story and accept that it's simply no good (which I refuse to believe), or B) I can try again. 

I opted to believe the latter, so I sent the story out again.

Whether or not this will pan out is entirely out of my hands. All I can do is keep trying. Even if this one ends in rejection as well, I'll have at least made the effort, and really, considering everything, that all we can ask of ourselves. "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again."