#submission process

I have a story of victory, to share with you. A few months back, I crawled over the rotting corpse pile of my self-worth and submitted four pieces of poetry to a publication.

I was rather found of those four, though admittedly they were difficult picks, as any of you may know from the process, larger e-zines and newsletter-type arenas will only accept pieces that have not seen previous publications.

I post quite a few pieces of my art here to demand praise in the form of internet numbers and the rare piece of verbal encouragement, so pickings are a touch slim, especially for pieces I view as my best works.

If something hasn’t seen daylight, its probably because I haven’t finished it, or don’t like it very much. I’m a very harsh critic, and I don’t trust my judgment much, so these flickering cheers of blasphemous intent really set fire to my smoldering ego. I genuinely, couldn’t do this without you.

But I promised good news! And I’ve been talking in tangentially related double-helixes! So the submissions have been reviewed, after several months of waiting, and I’ve been informed of their fate!

They were rejected. Across the board. Not for content, not without empathy, simply quietly released from captivity.

And, I’m actually alright with that. I’ve been published. You delightful little mistakes tell me how many people have seen my art in a constant.

Now, to be clear, I’m not ecstatic that each piece was removed from the running. I’m quite fond of those pieces, and would love to see them travel beyond my own means. But I did everything I was supposed to.

I let other people see my work. I threw it to the wind and waited to see what would be taken, and nothing came of it. But failure would only come in refusal to continue. This is a victory, because this is as bad as it gets.

The worse my career can be is a rejection notice.

And it helps, I think, that I’ve read one of those pieces in front of a crowd, and they clapped for me. It helps, that three whole separate people looked me in the eye and said, “Hey, that was really good, thanks for letting us hear that.”

It helps that my reviewer left a note on one of the polite copy-pastes of ‘sorry, but no cigar’ to tell me, that a body horror piece, something that crawled out of me in and further inspired by fits of strangling body dysphoria, to tell me, a stranger, just a name on the other end of a pdf, that they thought it was surprising. And clever. And ain’t that a fucking trick?

I was rejected from a position I was fighting against hundreds to fill. Not because my work was bad, or of less value, but because it simply wasn’t quite right for the publication.

That is a failure only if I nail it to my chest and walk into the ocean. I made art, and now I have a chance to share it with others. I have a chance to allow a new audience, not because that shot in the dark worked, but because my ammunition has been returned to me, and I get to throw it all over again.

Tonight I held a victory, dear heretics. Someday I will hold another. And another, and another, and thousands more, until I could build a curtain out of rejection notices, and a centerpiece out of acceptance slips.

If you’re referring to using the tag for aro writers, as opposed to allies, then I can confirm that’s absolutely fine. I understand not wanting to be out, and certainly won’t be demanding proof of someone’s aromanticism to use that tag. I’m also happy for questioning people to use it.

On this topic, I thought I should bring up there are also multiple ways to submit to AroWriMo (more info here).

Those of you following my blog know that I recently hired an editor to go through my WIP, RESILIENCE, in order to get it ready to start the submission process. If you’ve read my previous posts on this, you’ll also know that I was completely terrified to hear what the editor said.

As an introvert, it is painful to have to share my writing with others and this is only the second time I’ve shared the entire book with anyone. My biggest fear was that there was something deeply wrong with the entire story. I worried that the entire concept was unbelievable, that it was too predictable, or that it just didn’t make any sense. I was therefore incredibly relieved when I opened up my letter and saw the following paragraph:

Wow, this book really surprised me. Every time I thought I knew where it was going, you threw in a twist. There is no way when I started reading that I could have guessed the book would unfold as it did. It felt very original and I enjoyed it very much.

Yes!!! It was original and unpredictable! That feedback is the best that I could hope for. For me that was a humongous relief! Just the fact that someone who reads books for a living couldn’t predict where it was going means something. It means I did something right.

Of course, it goes on to list numerous changes I need to make with the timeline and some logistics of different scenes. That is, after all, what I was paying her to do, but the structure of the overall story line is sound and that is certainly a relief.