Writing is a very solitary endeavor especially when you’re unpublished. You write and plot and write and submit to markets and get rejections. I’ve been submitting stories to various markets for a couple of years now, shelving them as my skills get so much better that I no longer want to have them out there. I’ve almost gotten used to getting the rejections. To be fair, I’ve made it a game; I’ve got a charm bracelet that gets a new charm every time I cross a milestone. The next is fifty rejection letters which may or may not have already been crossed. I should probably check.
In any case, it can get a little overwhelming sometimes. Last week was one of those times for me. Writing has been hard lately and my partner was away and I always have trouble sleeping when he’s not there so I was also tired. And then I got another form rejection for a short story I’d sent out. So I was feeling low and farting around online when lo and behold I noticed Chuck Wendig had poste Kameron Hurley’s essay on the importance of persistence in a writing career – which really applies to anything that’s hard and is also something you want to do.
Apparently the take-away for a lot of people has been that you need to suffer to become an author, a message of horrible, horrible despair. For me it was one of hope. To me, Kameron was saying that you need to keep going, even if it seems impossible, because what’s on the other side is worth it.
So:
Write, submit, repeat.
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