Thursday, January 22, 2009

Acceptances & Rejections

I've been writing for a long time and with some success. I've published articles and books and sold poems (best price: $15; worst price: $1 -- of which 37 cent was deducted by PayPal as a service fee!). But I've also still get my share of rejections. Today was fairly typical. I had a prose poem, "Blood and Feathers," accepted by Dogzplot and a 10-page chapbook rejected by ml press. It doesn't matter that essentially the same material that was rejected by ml press will appear online in the magazine Bartleby Snopes. I still felt crummy. But not as crummy as I used to feel after a rejection. And not for as long. That's the biggest difference. It isn't that I don't feel discouraged and even humiliated by rejections. It's just that I don't feel so badly discouraged and humiliated as I once did.

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