Deborah's Journal

Being discouraged is part and parcel of a working writer's life. Negative reviews, ditto. Some of us are naturally more thick-skinned about them than others, and most of us develop coping strategies over the years. This is where networking with other writers can be very helpful. We say things like:

• If you're not accumulating rejection slips, you're not doing your job (taking risks, "pushing the envelope").


• Just file the slip (or email) and send the story out


• Remember how many times A Wrinkle in Time was rejected.


• Editors are human, too; they have bad days, and it's no one's fault if your hero has the same name as their ex.


• Hey, I'm making progress from a form rejection to a personal note and invitation to submit again!

Even after many professional sales, a rejection can sting. The sting doesn't last as long as it might when we were first starting out, and we have tools (see above) and lots of writerly commiseration to help us. We know from experience that the sting will pass; we have acquired the habit of immediately diving back into the next project, so that we always have something fresh and exciting in the pipeline.

Then there are the situations when a story or book is sold and the publisher goes out of business. The editor gets fired. I know authors this has happened to more than once. We find ourselves wondering if we killed the magazine. We didn't, but that laughter overlays the secret and utterly illogical fear that our writing careers are somehow jinxed. Then we sell something else and there are no thunderbolts from above. We carry on.


Reviews, ah reviews, and in this category I include feedback from critique groups and beta readers. So much has already been said about the power of a caustic review or harsh feedback of a work in progress that I won't belabor the point here. Suffice it to say that the natural human desire for praise (for our creative "children") leaves us vulnerable to interpreting criticism of the work with condemnation of ourselves. Or, having torn off our emotional armor to write from the heart, we've also ripped off any defenses against sarcasm, etc. I'm among those who, having received scathing feedback, went home, and cried. I never considered giving up (although on more than one occasion, I contemplated getting even and thankfully resisted the temptation). But some writers have. ( Read more... )

For the last seven weeks, I’ve been away from home, helping to take care of my best friend and her family during the end of her life. I had no idea how hard it would be, but we did well by her and her passing was peaceful, attended by great tenderness and forgiveness. I stayed on for another ten days to organize the memorial and transition for her family.

During this entire time, one of my personal anchors was writing. I loaded up my netbook with current projects and took the folders with checklists for various Book View Café projects I was working on. In this way, I created a portable office, albeit one that lacked all the resources I had at home. For example, although I had access to the internet through my carrier’s website, I didn’t have my address book files. I learned to “work around” these limitations, focusing instead on what I could do, delegating and asking for help with things I couldn’t, and postponing other tasks. As a result, I was productive with some projects but “on hold” in others.

Now I’m back in my own office, resources at hand. I’m facing a dual challenge: coming “up to speed” and getting back into balance. What do I mean by balance? I mean reapportioning (or rather, un-deapportioning) my time and focus. Rarely have I been so aware of the many activities involved in my life as a writer. These include, to name a few, original fiction writing (drafting, revision, revision-to-editorial-request), other aspects of book production (proofreading); editing anthologies; beta-reading and editing books, often for other Book View Café members; writing blog posts like this one; keeping up with professional communications (reading and responding to email from fellow writers, fans, and editors, not to mention news of the publishing world).
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Over on my blog, Margaret Yang and Harry R. Campion, who write together as M. H. Mead, talk about why they consider their books a set instead of a series. I think this is a distinction worth considering, for both newer writers and those of us who've been around for a bit.

Readers often fall in love with a world and its characters (and we as writers do that, too, but we also experience a natural reluctance to start again completely from scratch with a new project when we have a richly developed landscape, cultures, and history -- not to mention fabulous characters -- just begging for more adventures!) This temptation is not without risk. One is that if the reading satisfaction and completeness of each book is dependent on having read all that has come before, you're setting up a scenario for decreasing sales. This is perhaps less a problem with epublishing, when books remain "in print" essentially forever, than it was when a mass market paperback's shelf life was measured in days before it was swept away to make room for the next release. Readers are naturally reluctant to pick up a book in the middle of such a series.
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Cherie Priest offers an excellent essay, explaining what authors do and don't have a say over.

We do control: our words, how we communicate in person and online.

We sometimes have a say in: who gets review copies, how visible we are (i.e., convention appearances).

We have no power whatsoever over: cover art, cost, format, scheduling, distribution, foreign editions or whether the book gets made into a movie. (Although it has been known for an author to demand that her name be taken off a movie that was made from her book.)