So I got a rejection the other day that really bothered me. It burrowed its way deep inside my brain and hunkered down, having apparently made up its mind that this would be a lovely place to live. It wasn’t your typical sort of rejection. It didn’t come from a journal or an agent or a publisher. It didn’t offer any chance of personal feedback or the suggestion to try again. This was a rejection for a grant, an artist’s grant through the Ohio Arts Council.

When I applied for the grant, I knew it was a long shot. Only ten percent of the artists who apply, the application instructions said, receive funding. Still, I felt I had a decent enough shot that it was worth my time to put together the application materials. After all, the stories I included as my writing sample had all been published both in journals and in my award winning book, and two of them were nominated for Pushcarts.

The application process was complicated, the instructions poorly put together and lengthy. When it came time to mail the materials in, the grant instructions directed me to send the package to the wrong address, so, after my materials were returned to sender, I then had to hunt down the correct address, mail it priority, and hope I was actually finished this time.

Maybe it’s because it was such a time and energy consuming process applying for the damn thing that I started to feel an unwarranted sense of entitlement about this grant. I should definitely get this, I began to tell myself. Why wouldn’t I? I’m a good writer. I know people like these stories—there’s no gamble there. Only ten percent of the applications are approved, but just imagine how many of those come from amateurs who have deluded themselves into believing their not-ready-for-prime-time stuff is good. No way was I one of those amateurs. Nuh-uh. Not a chance.

Right.

I became so convinced I was going to get the grant, I started planning out how I would spend the $5,000—no joke! I was going to embark on a book tour across Ohio, and try my best to get my book in the hands of as many readers as possible. I could never afford to do something like that right now, but with that grant . . .

Of course, I didn’t get it. Incidentally, I knew I hadn’t gotten it before I got the email informing me of the fact. I knew because, in a series of events involving Facebook comments and the friend of a friend, I learned that the people who did get the grant had already been contacted. And I hadn’t heard anything yet.

So. When I received an email from the OAC, my heart only lurched a little bit. I opened it and scanned through, knowing already what I would find. The grant committee has met bla bla sorry to inform you bla bla bloo. They could have said, “Dear Amateur, quit wasting our time,” and the rejection wouldn’t have hit me any harder.

First, I was bummed.

Then, I was ashamed, very, very ashamed. For actually thinking I stood a chance.

Normally, rejections don’t really get to me, and even when they do, they don’t get to me as much as this one did. I had to talk it out with Damien—I don’t usually dwell on rejections, you see, so I don’t usually talk about them with Damien besides to say, “Guess who’s one point closer to Amazon bucks?”—because I knew if I said it out loud, it would seem ridiculous that I was so bothered. It did, and I felt better getting it out there, but I also realized that the reason this rejection hurt so much was because I had allowed myself to believe I was better than I actually am.

This is sort of the roller coaster of being a writer, at least this is how it’s always been for me. You have some smallish series of successes and begin to believe you must have arrived, or are at least well on your way. Then something happens—a rejection, a bad workshop, maybe even just the realization that the aforementioned successes don’t mean much in the grand scheme of things—and you’re knocked down a peg or two, maybe not all the way down to where you started, but certainly down to where you belong.

And the truth is, this is necessary. This is exactly as it should be. We need to be reminded that we’re not brilliant, that we do have to keep working very hard if we want those successes to keep coming. We need to be reminded that for every one person who likes what we’ve written, at least one (and probably many more) doesn’t. We need to remember these things lest we stagnate in our own hubris. Nothing is more damaging to a work of art, in my opinion, than the artist’s belief that he or she can do no wrong. If nothing else, our failures can motivate us to succeed next time, just like that old cliché: the only real failures are the people who give up.

I have all kinds of things I want to talk to you about in the coming weeks. I want to tell you about my oddly regressive reaction to a recent rejection and what I learned from it. I want to tell you about my friend Kelly’s new book, how good it is, and how inspired it makes me to get to work myself. I want to tell you about my strange compulsion to look up jobs on AWP’s job list.

But first, I want to tell you about an exciting new blog project I’ve got in the works. To keep things from getting stale here, I’ve decided to line up some interviews with published authors to post on my blog. My idea is to post interviews with authors who published their books in different ways: I’ve got a self-published author lined up, an author whose book was published through a small press, and I plan to get an author who won a book contest and an author whose book was sold by an agent, too. These interviews, which I’m thinking I’ll post over the course of the entire month of March, should provide some interesting insight into the range of publishing options available.

Posting them in March, by the way, will be a nice break for me. Between AWP and another reading in Pittsburgh and final papers to grade and family visiting during spring break, March is going to be a very busy month for me. It’ll be nice to have the interviews all done and ready to post, and basically take a month off from blogging.

If it goes well, I’m thinking I might continue doing interviews now and then on the blog in the future. Let me know if you have any suggested topics or interviewees, and let me know, too—after I post them, of course—what you think of the interviews I’ll be posting in March.

Happy New Year! It’s that time of year, the time when we all look back on what we’ve done (and what we haven’t) in the past year. 2011 was a great year for me—the best year of my life, actually—and I say that in spite (yes, and definitely not because) of the fact that I hardly wrote at all the entire year.

If you’ve been following along, you know that I had a very on again/off again, false start kind of year as a writer. A lot of things changed in my life, pretty much all of them for the better, but my shifting world (and my disappointment over the anticlimax of publishing my first book) left me with a bit of difficulty getting anything productive done. My mind was a jumbled mess for the better part of the year, and once the baby came in September, I’ve been running on amounts of sleep so infinitesimal it’s a wonder I can even think at all.

But my Amalie is nearing four months old now (wow, it’s going by so fast!) and is sleeping longer stretches at night. Getting her down for a nap is still a nightmare, but overall, she’s a very easy, sweet-natured little baby, and I’m feeling more and more well rested every day. So, time to get back on the wagon for once and for all.

During my winter break from teaching, I had planned to write for a steady schedule of at least fifteen minutes a day. That plan, ambitious though it wasn’t, crumbled by the end of my first week off. I’m not going to bother coming up with excuses. It’s embarrassing to think I couldn’t even keep up such a basic writing schedule as that. But the important thing is I’m not going to let that failure prevent me from trying again. I know I can get back into the groove of writing. If there’s anything my years of making a serious go as a writer have taught me, it’s that writing is just like anything else in life—just like exercise. It can be hard to get yourself in the habit of it, but once you get your momentum going, there’s no stopping you. 

So here I am, at the beginning of a new year (and at the beginning of a new quarter—yes, school is already back in session this week), and I’m ready to make it count this time. I’m not going to set the goal of writing absolutely every day—I just can’t do it, with my crazy, new mom life right now. But I am going to make a goal for 2012: I intend to complete and begin circulating at least five stories by the end of the year. That’s actually not that ambitious of a goal, either. Back when I was an MFA student, I would be working on at least that many stories each semester. I’ve already got a good three stories in completed draft form, which have been revised multiple times already. I can easily finish up those three and write and revise two new ones in a year.

A year, after all, is a very long time. Even if I have several more false starts, there’s time enough to make this happen. There’s time enough, yes. There always is.

Happy Holidays—I’m takin’ the week off!

I decided recently that it’s been quite long enough, and it’s time for me to get back into the writing game. Of course, the decision to begin writing again is one thing, and the actual beginning of writing again is another thing altogether. It was necessary, then, for me to formulate some sort of plan to ease myself back into the world I used to live in so completely.

I made the goal that during my winter break from classes (which lasts a paltry three weeks), I would write every single day for at least fifteen minutes. “Fifteen minutes? That’s nothing,” you say. “Not even enough time to really get the fire going.” True enough, but I settled on this goal for a reason: it would be easy for me to keep it. Anyone can scrape together a measly fifteen minutes a day, and because I would be on break from teaching, it would be even easier for me to make it work. 

My hope is that writing at least a little every single day will help get the wheels turning once again, after which it shouldn’t take me too long to get back up to speed. My break only officially began this past Monday, so it’s difficult to assess too thoroughly how well it’s working. I can tell you that on day two (Tuesday), I forgot to sit down to write. Forgot! I was so frustrated with myself on Wednesday when I realized my mistake, but on Thursday I wrote for a little over half an hour and made up for it.

I also contented myself with the knowledge that forgetting to write one day is not the same as choosing not to write. The fact is, I’m no longer so mired in the writing world that going a full day without writing could never escape my notice. Writing used to be, for me, like taking a shower: you do it pretty religiously every day, and if for some reason one day you can’t, you survive it . . . but you’re very aware that you missed a day. I’ll get back there, I know I will, but it’s going to take a little time.

In addition to the day I completely forgot to write, on Friday I didn’t get a chance (sort of). Even though the ideal time for me to write is fairly early on in my day, right now, with a three-month-old baby and a husband who doesn’t get a winter break from his main job (working as the Managing Editor of New Ohio Review), I’ve been taking my fifteen minutes at the end of the day, just after Amalie goes to bed. I probably could find time earlier in the day, but the end of the day thing was working well enough. Until Friday. The day Amalie, for whatever reason, simply would not go down without a fuss. She kept falling asleep, but the second I’d lay her down she’d wake up and start crying. Finally, at around 1:30 AM, she drifted off, but I was too tired to even think about writing (plus, it technically wasn’t Friday any longer).

Other than those two slips, I’ve enjoyed my few minutes of writing time each day, and am already finding myself thinking about this piece or that idea when I’m not physically writing. I may have to flush all the brown water out of my system before I can write anything very good, but still, writing at all again feels pretty great. It’s like I’ve been wandering lost for what feels like a very long time, but now I’ve stumbled upon an overgrown path that looks vaguely familiar. I have to beat the weeds and tree branches out of my way, but I feel fairly positive that if I keep heading forward, this path will let me out somewhere I want to be.

I thought it might be nice, since my Ami B. will be three months old this Tuesday, to take a look back at how things have changed for me, as a writer, since becoming a mother. Much to my surprise, for the first couple of weeks, I actually did have plenty of time to write, or at least, I would have if I had chosen to use it for that. I did not. Ami slept most of the time, and she hardly ever cried. But rather than using her sleeping time to write, I tried to rest as much as I could, too. I was, after all, on the mend, in more than the usual way, since I got very sick immediately after the delivery and was bedridden in the hospital for a few days.

Then, just when I started getting my energy back, Ami started staying awake more and more, and spending, as it turned out, the majority of her waking time crying. She started wailing when we tried to lay her down in her crib. To increase my milk supply, she started eating more and more frequently—sometimes as often as every hour, which meant I sometimes spent most of the day and night with her attached to one breast or the other. That free time of the first two weeks, which I had wasted sleeping or staring blankly at some crappy Netflix reality TV show or other, was gone, and I resigned myself to the fact that I just wouldn’t be able to write, probably, for several months.

But I’m happy to say that finally at about two months old, my Amalita started fussing less and less. Her prolonged nighttime fussiness—called unhappy hour or the witching hour, depending on which book you read—pretty much went away altogether, and when she does fuss, now, we sort of know what to do most of the time. On top of that, her sleeping habits have gotten more predictable. She still refuses to sleep in her crib (from talking to other parents, I’m beginning to think that no baby in the history of babies has ever willingly slept in his or her crib), but she’ll go down for a good five hours at the beginning of the night and then wake regularly ever three hours after that for a little nighttime snack. I’m actually getting a reasonable amount of sleep again . . . and having dreams! Oh, sweet dreams. Even when they’re nightmares it feels so good to wake up and know that I was sleeping deeply enough to have them.

And though she’s awake and alert most of the day now, which means she needs almost constant attention, the time to write is there if I take it. Damien and I have both started to get the hang of this whole parenting thing, enough, anyway, that we’re not convinced we’re doing everything wrong and damaging her in some irreparable way. As a result, he can take her when I need to get something done, and vice versa. Still, I haven’t really been writing. It would be a lie to say I haven’t written at all since she was born, but still, I haven’t written more than maybe a total of a couple pages, not counting blog posts and a book review. The time is there, in other words, but just like that first two weeks after Amalie’s birth, I’m not using it to write.

But I do have plans to slowly get back into the writing game during the winter break. I’ll tell you all about it next week.

This holiday season I strongly urge you to buy small press books and literary journals for the people in your life who enjoy reading. I made a resolution last year to buy people small press books as often as possible when it comes time to buy someone a gift, and it’s worked out very well. Here’s why:

Small presses and literary journals need your support. Some of the best writing out there is being published by these venues, but a vast majority of the reading public doesn’t even know these books are out there. Small presses and journals usually operate mostly or entirely using funding from grants. They don’t have much money coming in, and they NEED people to buy copies of their books to keep themselves afloat. But with little or no budget for marketing, every single copy sold is a triumph; every book you or anyone else buys goes to a very worthwhile cause.

That’s right: buying these books is doing a good deed. It is! Small presses and journals are important from a cultural and artistic perspective. They take the chances that major publishers don’t take. They publish work based on its artistic and literary merit, NOT based on how much money it’s likely to rake in. Without these publishers, we would live in a world in which mostly all that’s available to read is the literary equivalent of big budget Hollywood blockbusters. Can you imagine a world without independent films? If the small presses were all to go under, that’s exactly the literary world we’d be stuck with. Sure, there would be a small selection of higher quality books, just like the Hollywood studios put out a few decent movies for Oscar consideration each year, but major studios and publishers alike are driven by the bottom line, and so the bad far, far outweighs the good.  

And if you’re a writer, I shouldn’t even need to explain to you why it’s in your best interest to keep small presses and literary journals out there. Unless you plan on getting really lucky, you’ll likely need to publish in these venues before you can hope to land an agent or a two book deal with a major publishing house (and those of us who are really being honest with ourselves know that the likelihood is that we’ll publish in these smaller places forever).

But culling gifts from small presses and journals is not just a good deed; it also makes for some genuinely awesome presents. Buying small press books or literary journals for your loved ones who enjoy reading will most likely expose them to authors, stories, and books they would never otherwise have heard of. It doesn’t mean you just buy something random that the recipient of the gift won’t even want. There are so many varied small press books and journals out there, you’re bound to find something for every reader on your gift list if you just take the time to look. I LOVE getting a book that looks good but that I didn’t even know existed for a gift. It’s an unexpected treat; it gives me something I never would have known I wanted and often opens up a whole new world of books I want to read when I find a new author whose writing I love.

So why not give it a try this year? To get started, you can find a good list of small presses and literary journals, complete with links to the press and journal websites, at NewPages.com. NewPages also posts book and journal reviews, which might help you pick out what to buy for whom, if you’re having trouble. Go here to look for small presses, and here to find a list of literary journals.