Posted on by TheSwan

Back Home to Lit Journals

IMG_20190827_143453

Since major publishers are hardly publishing literary novels these days (read about it here and here and here and here), I’ll soon be spending most of my writing time writing short stories–just like I was doing years ago. For the last six years, I’ve been writing novels in hopes I could get one published by a major publisher. I’m finally ready to let that dream die. I can’t fight the market. I can’t conjure readers into existence. Readers are doing other things now–they are scrolling and binge-watching. And the readers who are reading have so many choices, and most of their choices are driven to their view by careful and pointed Amazonian marketing and other big-money-for-few-books marketing tactics. But that is okay. I will still write the occasional novel and send it to small presses (one never knows), but it’s time to go back to my old friends, literary journals. I visited them a couple of years ago and was welcomed with opened arms as they swooped up my flash fiction, one story after another. All these years–almost three decades since I discovered them–and they are still there, still here, and we fiction writers need them more than ever.

Posted on by TheSwan

Deflecting Rejection

20171029_134111_HDR

Fiction writers have to be resilient. We spend hours, days and months creating make-believe worlds that most likely no one will ever read. I just completed my fifth novel in five years, spending seven months of daily commutes on buses and ferries, and at the end of it, sending out twenty queries to agents. Most likely, none will be interested. People who don’t write and writers who have never sent out manuscripts think this is a failure on the writer’s part, that if the book is good enough, it will be snatched up. Years ago, I thought this. But this isn’t the case. There are a number of factors that keep an agent from requesting the full manuscript to read–the market and timing being two of the strongest factors. It isn’t easy for us. Why do we go on?

Hope, I think. I hope that the next query letter I write for the next novel I write will be the letter that makes an agent say, “Please send me the full manuscript to read.” All these novels I’ve written, and no agents have asked to even read the whole thing. Is it my writing? Or is it something else? I want to believe it is something else.  But rejection can weigh a writer down. Two novels ago, I told myself I can’t do this anymore. The novel I just wrote was often painful to get through. Yet I finished it, and I sent out queries, and I expect rejection, and I got some, and I got some silence (the worst kind of rejection), and I got one request for the introductory material from an agent who asked for introductory material from the novel before this one, and who rejected it.

But three days ago, I got an idea for another novel. I feel pretty good about it. I am hopeful, again. And so, I will put aside the books I had planned on reading, and the book clubs I had planned on joining, and I will write. I will board the 7:20 am bus and the 8:05 am ferry and the 8:45 am bus, and I will write. Later, I will get on the 5:30 pm bus and the 6:20 pm ferry and the 7:05 pm bus, and I will write. I will do this for months until my next novel is done.