Just Grin and Bear It

This seems to be the week of rejections. I'm not going to go on about the latest such letter I received this morning. No, today I'm going to talk about perseverance.

I'm a very stubborn person. At least I call it stubbornness. Others call it oppositional defiance. I don't like being told what to do, or that I can't do something. Ask my mother. :) I think this is part of the reason why I'm not as beat up about the rejections as I suppose I should be. Though no one has said anything negative about my queries, they're still saying 'no, it doesn't interest us' which just gets me fired up even more.

Perseverance is that quality we see in the underdog that makes us root for them. It's what made me sit there and cry my eyes out for 300. I cry every single time I see all of those delicious men in their loincloths being beat down by the Persians. I cry and cry when King Leonidas is skewered by those arrows with the bodies of his loyal 300 Spartans littering the ground around him. They knew they weren't going to win, but it didn't matter. They gave Greece time to regroup, giving up their lives for the greater good.

So I think authors have to have more than a little of this same quality. We trudge on no matter the obstacles in our paths, no matter how many times we hear 'you have a strong writing voice, but it just doesn't suit me' or 'I just wasn't sufficiently interested in this enough to request more'. We wrap ourselves in the cloak of our words, arm ourselves with our pens, and straggle down the road to publication anyway. How does that phrase go? 'Return with your novel, or upon it.'

Do you have a special attribute you believe has helped you in your writing career? What's your recipe for rejection?

By the way, I've started up a new blog and website.

Check it out at http://www.danicaavet.wordpress.com/