Even though I said recently that I would not, under any circumstances, be returning to the novel that was my graduate thesis, this past week I went into my trusty old “Failed Attempts” file on my computer and turned what was an 80,000 word novel into a 21,000 word novella. I’ve been thinking about doing this pretty much ever since I sentenced the document to my “Failed Attempts” prison. I guess making that very difficult but important decision freed me up to see the novel for what it really was: about 70 good pages of story and close to 200 pages of filler, of me trying to sustain the length of a novel without really knowing how.

Though this was not the first novel I’d written, as a novel it was more of good practice than a worthwhile piece of literature. It was me learning how to fill in that many pages, me learning how to revise something that lengthy. After multiple revisions, though, it’s still too flawed to be a workable book. I can see that now. There are huge components of the plot, entire characters, that feel flat, unbelievable, over-written.

But there’s some good stuff in there, too. At its core, there’s a nugget of an interesting story, which is what kept me working and trying and believing in this novel for so long. Once I accepted that the novel would never be good enough, I realized that maybe if I pared it down to that nugget of good stuff, maybe then I would have something worth reading.

The impetus to finally give it a try came from the Iron Horse Literary Review newsletter. Iron Horse is currently open for entries in their annual single-author competition, and this year they’re accepting novellas only. I almost never enter contests. With the exception of book contests, the few times I’ve decided to spend the money, I haven’t even gotten so much as an honorable mention. I’m just not good enough, I’ve told myself, so it would be like throwing my money away.

But it isn’t, really. The entry fees for contests help to support the journals you’re paying the fees to, and most entry fees entitle you to a subscription to the journal anyway. Your money is going to something worthwhile, even if your submission doesn’t place.

So I decided to use the Iron Horse contest as motivation to trim this novel to novella length. At a first pass, I got it down to about 95 pages—roughly 30,000 words. The contest guidelines stipulate that entries must be no more than 20,000 words—roughly 65 pages. I did some more tinkering and trimming and got it down to a lean 21,000 words, but I still need to cut another 1,000 if I want to enter the contest. I may not make it—the deadline is less than two weeks away—but I’m certainly going to give it a go.

Even if I can’t get it down to 20,000 words, I feel good about this experience. It was useful for me to see just how much I could cut from the manuscript, and it feels good, too, to see it take shape as something that might be publishable after all. Maybe this novella will eventually end up in the “Failed Attempts” file, too, but right now, I feel really good about how it’s turning out.

I’ve been working as an Associate Editor for Bound Off for a few months now, and I think it’s time to talk a little bit about what I think you can learn from working on a literary journal.

1.      Reading submissions gives you an idea of an editor’s perspective. I’m given ten submissions to read every two weeks. It’s not an overwhelming number by any means, and since we only publish flash fiction, I DO read every submission all the way through. I know, however, from previous experience working for journals that this isn’t always the case. Many editors and slush pile readers stop reading as soon as they feel they can justify saying no—why waste their time reading the entire thing when they already know they won’t accept it?

But even people like me who do read every story all the way through expect to be sucked in quickly. If your story gets off to a plodding start, or has lots of exposition right away, or is extremely confusing for the first few pages, you’ll be really lucky if an editor sticks with you to the payoff later in the story. And even if the editor does stick with you, that payoff will have to be damn good to justify an uninspired beginning.

2.      Reading failed submissions forces you to think about what makes writing good or bad. When I respond to submissions, I’m supposed to give a brief summary of the story and say a thing or two about what I liked or didn’t like about it. Then I give my yes or no (or sometimes maybe) vote.

Because I have to articulate why I’m saying yes or no, I have to really think about the strengths and weaknesses of each story. I can’t just say, “It wasn’t my kind of story.” Instead, I have to figure out what about this story makes it not good enough in my opinion. It goes the other way too. When I say yes to a story, I have to put into words why I think the story deserves a spot on the podcast, and it’s got to be more convincing than, “I just really liked it.”

3.      Reading submissions helps you put rejection into perspective. I can’t stand it when editors claim that most of the submissions they see are terrible. That’s BS! I’ve found that in any batch of ten submissions, two or three are “terrible,” although I would probably opt to describe them as amateurish instead. It doesn’t mean these writers will never amount to anything, but they’re not there yet. I don’t feel bad saying no to these stories because, aside from the fact that I want our journal to only have good stories so people will actually listen to it, these writers need to learn that their writing is not up to par yet. Rejection is probably the most painful for writers at that stage, who are submitting though they’re not ready to submit, but it’s also an important part of the process of becoming a good writer.

The other seven or eight stories in each batch—which, keep in mind, amounts to seventy to eighty percent of the submissions—could not, in my opinion, be reasonably  described as terrible. These are stories that are clearly NOT written by novices. They’re well written; they often have elegant prose and make good use of craft techniques. But that doesn’t mean they get accepted. We accept only a very low percentage of the stories that get submitted to us, which means we reject the majority of those pretty good stories.

I sometimes agonize over whether to say yes or no to a particular story. Some stories are so good in so many ways, but there will be just one thing bringing it down. It might be too much exposition, or maybe some element of the plot doesn’t feel original enough. Whatever it is, I have to find reasons to whittle that remaining seven or eight stories down to maybe one “yes” vote. From there, the stories will be read by other editors, who will add their own votes without knowing mine, just as I didn’t know what those who had read the stories before me thought.

Since I’ve been volunteering for Bound Off, it’s happened exactly three times that I read a story that I instantly and uncontrollably fell in love with. Two of those stories ended up getting accepted—and pretty quickly, too. To my knowledge, so far none of the other “yes” votes I’ve offered have ended in an acceptance.

So you see, everything has to come together just right for an actual acceptance to happen. Rejections, then, shouldn’t devastate anyone too much, but do bring your work back to the drawing board if you get a lot of form rejections for it. Many of the stories I’ve said “no” to might have earned a “yes” had they just been revised in XYZ way. A rejection doesn’t mean your story has no potential, but sometimes it does mean your story needs a little more work.

A couple weeks ago, on the biweekly Writers Ask edition of the Book Fight podcast, Mike Ingram  and Tom McCallister talked about reading fees and their proliferation in the lit journal world. As editors themselves (of Barrelhouse), they had a useful take on the problem. They suggested that the reason so many journals are starting to charge submission fees might be because of how easy and tempting it is to charge them using Submittable (née Submishmash). They said all you have to do is check a box and enter in the amount. It seems like Submittable may have inadvertently put the idea of charging reading fees into some editors minds, and once some journals started doing it (and getting away with it), others followed suit.

And a lot of writers are willing to pay the fees for a chance to get published. From what I can tell, most journals are going with $3. $3—it sounds like a paltry amount, and it’s true that before online submissions, writers had to spend somewhere in that vicinity to print and mail submissions anyway. But as McCallister and Ingram point out, that money didn’t go to the journals. It’s not really an appropriate justification to say, “Oh, before technology advanced, you used to have to buy various products/services to submit. Now that you don’t need to pay that anymore, we’re going to make you give the money to us.” Sounds like the words of a schoolyard bully to me.

 McCallister and Ingram offer a whole slough of other reasons why the justification journals offer for their reading fees are not okay. I always think about something Damien has said. As the Managing Editor of New Ohio Review, applying for and managing the funding from grants is a big part of Damien’s job. As a pretty fantastic journal—the journal consistently gets Pushcart and Best American placements, and the majority of the authors in any given issue are big names who were solicited by the editors—New Ohio Review has a largish budget because they’re able to garner a fair amount of grant funding. They have plenty of money to cover their printing costs, pay their authors, and advertise. Oh yeah, and pay Damien’s salary.

Sure, not every great journal is able to get as much grant funding, but the point Damien has made is that the best journals will be able to get grants or find some means of funding themselves. If a journal is so financially unstable that it has to rely on submission fees to stay afloat, it’s probably a reflection of the quality of the journal. Is that really a journal you want your work to appear in?

When I first started getting serious about submitting, one of the first things I learned is that legitimate, reputable publishers don’t charge submission fees. It was considered unethical, and in fact, it was included in the CLMP code of ethics. The first journal I noticed was charging submission fees was Narrative. I was outraged. I didn’t understand why they were allowed to remain members of the CLMP. Needless to say, I refused to submit there (McCallister and Ingram had a few choice words to say about Narrative, too, which made me very happy). As more and more journals started doing it, though, I did cave and pay a few times (The Missouri Review charges for online submissions, for example, and they are a great, reputable journal, so I went ahead and paid it).  

But listen, if we pay these fees, the editors will keep charging them. Regardless of how much it costs to run a journal, and regardless of how much snail-mail submissions used to run, and regardless of whatever other justifications editors offer, CHARGING SUBMISSION FEES IS UNETHICAL. On Writer’s Ask, they offered the excellent analogy of an art gallery who doesn’t sell enough art to stay solvent. Nobody would think it was okay for the gallery to turn to artists who are interested in having their work displayed in the gallery and charge them a fee, no matter how minimal, just to consider showing their work.

Submission fees exploit writers. How can anyone claim it isn’t slimy to say to an aspiring writer, “So you want to be published? Sure, kid, I’ll look at your piece . . . for a fee.”  If you want to support a journal, donate to one or buy a subscription. But please, writers, DO NOT PAY SUBMISSION FEES. If we all stop paying them, the journals will have no choice but to stop charging them. The journals that can’t stay afloat any other way probably shouldn’t—I’m sorry, but it’s true—and they certainly shouldn’t keep themselves going by exploiting people’s dreams.

This week, Damien received several boxes at work, packed with the newest issue of New Ohio Review. It’s always exciting when the new issue arrives. He puts so much energy into designing and editing it that it almost feels unreal, I imagine, holding the final product in his hands. He brought a copy home and read aloud to me some of his favorite poems from the issue. I loved them, too, though it’s safe to say that as simply a reader, I don’t have quite the same experience reading the journal as he does, having been in on the issue from its inception, having watched it grow and become what it eventually became.

His enthusiasm, sharing the new issue with me, reminded me of why I decided to volunteer to work as an Associate Editor at Bound Off. Certainly, the amount of work I’ll put in at my position is nowhere near the amount Damien puts in at New Ohio Review (and a good thing, too, since he gets paid for his efforts, while mine is just a volunteer, few hours a week kind of job). Still, I look forward to having that satisfaction again, that feeling of accomplishment every time a new edition goes out (especially when a story I recommended we accept is part of that new edition).

I’m also looking forward to the ways slogging through a journal’s slush pile will improve my own writing. As writers, we sometimes forget that our work must first win over an editor before it can ever make it in front of a reader. Editors read slightly different from readers. While readers go into a piece expecting it to be good (because, after all, the bad stuff has been filtered out through the publication process), editors have no idea what they’re going to get every time they open a new submission—they may be about to read something brilliant, but it’s just as likely that they’re about to read something terrible. The most likely scenario, though, is that the story will be neither brilliant nor terrible, but will exist in that hazy world between. Those are the submissions it’s most difficult to decide on, but decide we must—and quickly! Quickly! We don’t have a lot of time to devote to each submission!

A reader goes in to a piece planning to like it, but an editor must reject 99% of everything he or she reads. This means an editor must read looking for reasons to say no, planning to say no. Knowing that 99 out of 100 submissions you receive will be rejected puts the odds in the “no” pile for every new submission you open. In a reader’s hands, then, each piece is innocent until proven guilty, but to an editor, the burden of proof (that the piece is worthwhile, that the piece deserves a spot on the page, or in Bound Off’s case, in the podcast) lies with the submission.

And it’s useful to remember this as a writer. It’s useful to remember it when you get rejected, because it takes the sting off a bit; it’s useful to remember it when you get accepted, because it hammers home how good you must be that your stuff is making it past the editorial hurdles; and it’s useful to remember it when you’re revising, because if you really want to make it into the hands of some readers, you do need to take the opinions of other smart, with-it, literary types into consideration. You do need other people’s feedback, and you need to seriously consider anything other people might say. The things your beta readers or workshop classmates are getting stuck on might be the same things that cause an editor to slide your submission into the “no” pile.

This doesn’t, of course, mean that every piece of feedback you ever receive should be taken or that you should change your work in a way that you, as the writer, don’t like. But. You should listen, and more than that, you should really seriously evaluate any feedback you receive if publication is one of your goals, and let’s be honest, for most of us, it is.

This past year at AWP, I spent the majority of my time perusing the booths and tables in the book fair. Though I actually tend to enjoy panel discussions and lectures—even though there’s rarely ever anything new said at this point in the game—my favorite part of AWP (not counting seeing old friends) is the book fair.

This year at the book fair, I took a slightly different approach than last year. Last year, my primary interest was as a submitter. I wanted to see the variety of places I might submit. While I bought quite a few books and journals, and I bought only ones I was truly interested in reading, I also only bought ones that were published by venues I was interested in submitting to. I wanted to get a better idea of what these particular editors liked.

I believe this is precisely what most people do at the AWP book fair. The journals and presses know it too. They plan for it. They have on the ready printouts with their submission guidelines; they advertise their upcoming contests on glossy postcards.

But when you really think about it, it’s kind of sad. Here you have this huge market, full of hundreds upon hundreds—surely thousands—of books for sale, many of which are difficult to find in brick and mortar stores, yet the people shopping in the market are interested mostly in selling their own wares. There’s this great disconnect between what the publishers want—to sell the customers their books or journals—and what the customers want—to get published.

This year, when I hit the book fair floor, I didn’t do it as a writer, but as a reader. I wasn’t looking for places to submit. I didn’t care about upcoming contests. I just wanted to spend my leftover Christmas money on some good books and journals; I wanted to find some great stuff to read. Some of the journals I bought I would never consider submitting to—like Kugelmass, which publishes entirely literary humor. I don’t write humor, but I thought I might enjoy reading it, so I picked up their latest issue. And I bought books not because I was considering submitting my novel to that press, but because, simply put, the book looked good.

In the coming months, I’m going to review some of the journals I came home with here, on my blog. I decided to do this partly because it will encourage me to actually read the journals all the way through. Also, though, I hope to share my experience reading them with you. If I find a great gem in the batch, I want you to know about that gem. Likewise, if I come across a journal that I don’t think is that great, I’ll tell you why and let you decide for yourself if you want to read it or submit there.

About a year ago, I made the incredibly difficult decision to stop messing around with the novel I wrote as my MFA thesis and move on, at last. This came after years of writing and rewriting and submitting what I eventually admitted was a doomed manuscript—and the admission hurt. A lot.

My process for submitting the book had gone like this: I started by querying agents. I sent the first query on August 27^th, 2009, almost three years ago. I was mired in an agent hunt for a little over a year and a half, and during that time I queried exactly 61 agents. I received five manuscript requests and a handful of encouraging personal responses from agents whose submission process allows for the unsolicited submission of a partial manuscript. Of course, I mostly received form rejections, and sometimes, no response at all, but the personal responses I received were encouraging. I was told by several agents that the writing was really good, and some even said the story was compelling—they just didn’t fall in love with it.

By the end of my agent hunt, I had rewritten the manuscript several more times and had moved on to Plan B: entering the manuscript into contests. Money being tight, I entered the manuscript into only four contests before chucking the plan. I didn’t receive so much as an honorable mention in any of those contests, and having recently been through the contest process with Peter Never Came (the first contest I entered Peter Never Came into I won a semi-finalist slot; the third contest I entered I won first prize), I was pretty quickly disheartened and decided not to waste my money.

I had just begun to move on to Plan C, adding my manuscript to the ever growing slush piles of small presses, when I gave up. When I finally decided to move the manuscript to the “Failed Attempts” folder on my computer, I had submitted to only a handful of small presses—just the “big” small presses, if that oxy-moron doesn’t make your head want to explode. You know the ones I mean: the small presses who can afford the giant, luxurious, multi-table booths at AWP each year.

That was well over a year ago. I still haven’t heard back from all of them, though I’m certainly not holding my breath. But here’s the thing, here’s why I’m dredging this up again: I finally did get a response from one of  them—one of the “big” small presses, one of the biggest, without naming names—and the rejection . . . was incredibly encouraging. They said what a difficult decision it had been and that I should know that they really enjoyed the manuscript. They rejected it, yes, but their rejection left me unsure if I’d been too hasty to abandon the novel I’d worked so hard on.

And here I am again. Wondering. I can’t decide what the better route is: submit the manuscript to “small” small presses or stay the course, figuring whether the novel is publishable or not is beside the point because I need to move on with my life. But you know, even last year when I gave up, I still couldn’t bring myself to move the novel to my “Failed Attempts” file. It’s remained this whole time, unopened, in my “Novels” file. Part of me thinks it’s a waste to have a book that I believe is publishable just sitting there, collecting virtual dust.  But I don’t know, maybe I should leave the file exactly where it is now, in a sort of limbo, not given up on, exactly, but no longer making the rounds, either.

I’ve had two mostly unrelated epiphanies about submissions recently that I want to share with you. These seem pretty obvious when I say them out loud (or type them out, anyway) but maybe you’re like me and need them to be fairly explicit before they can really take root.

Epiphany #1: If you know the editor(s) of a journal like your writing, you should submit to that journal. Duh!

Until a few months ago, I had never submitted to a journal in which I had previously been published. This refusal to try the same venue twice was based on my desire to have an ever larger number of journals in which my work has appeared. Doesn’t it look better for me, I wondered, to say I’ve been published in more journals rather than having multiple pieces appear in the same journals?

I think this attitude was a holdover from back when I had only published one or two stories. At the time, I wanted to be able to say, in the bio section of my cover letter, “My work has appeared in X, Y, and Z, among others.” It’s that “among others,” see, that was getting me into trouble. I’m still very much an early career writer, but I now have a fair amount of publication credits to my name. This aspiration to always be adding to the number of places my work has appeared no longer matters.

But even if it did, that old idea was pretty counterproductive. When a journal publishes something you’ve written, that’s a pretty good sign those editors like your style. Why, then, would you cross that journal off your list of places to submit? That’s like saying “Oh, I can’t submit there. The chances are too good I’ll get accepted.” Not the soundest of logic.

After years of holding myself to this foolish imperative, a few months ago I finally decided to submit to a journal, the Bound Off podcast, in which I had been previously published. I love this podcast and loved how they had handled the story of mine they had already published, so I decided to go for it, and you know what? The new story was accepted (it should come out sometime this fall).

Epiphany #2: If you don’t like a journal, the journal is probably not going to like you.

Has this ever happened to you: Johnny is looking for places to submit and reading through the sample material posted to a journal’s website. Ug, he thinks, this stuff is terrible! My story is way better than the stuff these guys are publishing. I’ll surely get in! And then he giddily prepares his submission to the journal, preemptively patting himself on the back for his next soon-to-be publication.

Can anybody tell us where Johnny went wrong?

If you don’t like the stuff a journal is putting out, your aesthetic and that particular journal’s aesthetic just don’t line up. Literature is subjective, and if the editor(s) of a journal choose to publish a bunch of stuff that you think is crap, they’re probably going to think what you’re doing is crap. And even if they don’t—would you really want to be published in that journal anyway?

Okay, so maybe the term “epiphany” is a bit strong, but these are genuinely things I only recently started to think about in a conscious way, and I’ve been changing the way I submit as a result. And I’ve already earned myself one publication because of the change.

It’s early summer, and the rejections have been pouring in over here at the Cowger house. On the one hand, receiving a fairly steady stream of rejections is a good thing—it means I’ve been submitting, for one thing, and extended periods of silence from editors always make me question myself as a writer. At least when I’m getting rejections, I feel like I’m part of the writing world. (Plus, each rejection earns me at least one point on the submission response tally pinned to the bulletin board in my bedroom. I’m getting very, very close to a hundred points, which will earn me a $25 Amazon gift card.)

Still, receiving nothing but rejections from editors is sort of a lousy feeling, and to make things worse, I’ve almost entirely been receiving form rejections. For a while there, I felt like I had reached a point where, even though I still got rejected way more than I got accepted, I received mostly personal rejections, and when the rejections were form, they were usually the higher tier form rejections (the ones that state they thought your piece was good and they want to read more from you).

Ever since I had to start over with a whole new set of stories (because all of my other stories had either been published in journals, published in my book, or both), I feel like I’ve taken a huge step back in terms of rejections. Only one of my stories—one!—has been published since my book came out. Okay, part of this is because for about a year there, I was barely submitting. But for the past few months I’ve been getting back to my regular submission habits, and now the form rejections are starting to pile up.

Of course, the first possible reason for this is that my new stories aren’t any good. This, naturally, is where my mind first takes me every time I open a new email and read the same old words: “Thank you for your submission. Unfortunately . . .” I wonder, have I lost it? Did I use up all my stories, and I just need to accept that I only really ever had  a little over a book’s worth of stories inside me? Or is it that the stories in my book—most of them, anyway—were workshopped in grad school. Do I NEED the feedback of a class-full of writers in order to revise my work to completion?

But then I remind myself of the few personal rejections I have received on these very same stories. I’m getting a flow of form rejections right now, but the slow and irregular drip of rejections that were coming in before this included a fair amount of personal rejections, so maybe it’s not time to throw in the towel just yet.

Damien suggested that I consider the time of year it is before I read too much in to these form rejections. Most journals close for submissions during the summer, and this usually means there are some straggler submissions that the editors really want to plow through and respond to in a timely fashion. It’s nice to start the new submission period with an empty submission file, I’m sure. So the sudden flood of form rejections might just mean they were quickly working through their backlog and saying no a bit more readily than usual. No personal response might mean they’re strapped for time, that they don’t want to waste what little time they do have writing individual notes about every story they thought was good but that didn’t make the final cut.

Looking at it this way makes me feel a lot better. It might not actually be what’s going on here. It might be that I’m getting form rejections because these stories suck. It might also be I’m getting them because these stories aren’t as polished as I thought. Maybe I’m getting them because I’m just sending to the wrong places, places for which these stories aren’t a good fit. It’s even possible I’m getting them because the editors just didn’t read my submissions very closely. There’s no way to know. That’s the (often frustrating) nature of form rejections: they tell you very little about your submission. But to look at it in a positive way, it does mean that these form rejections are not necessarily a sign that I’m a failure as a writer. I’m going to keep plowing ahead and keep submitting, and even more important, I’m going to keep working on some new stories that might help me garner some more personal rejections, or better yet, an acceptance.

It’s no big secret that the three years I spent in my MFA program were among the best of my life (or maybe I should change that to the last two, maybe two-and-a-half, years in the program, since, in fact, my first semester was pretty discouraging, so discouraging that I almost quit the program and gave up on writing altogether). While I was in my program, I grew immensely as a writer. I came to understand the role momentum plays in my output, and I became, for a while, a very disciplined writer, a writer who writes for a couple of hours almost every day, a writer who produces a lot of work.

From the time I began getting published—during my second year in the program—I’ve been scoring a minimum of two publications a year. Two a year isn’t great, but I’ve always felt good about the fact that, if nothing else, I’ve never dipped below that number. But this year, I fear, will be the year. We’re heading into May and I don’t have any impending acceptances. I’ve only just recently begun submitting again, after a several month long hiatus, and though I have four stories in circulation right now, it seems unlikely that two of them will get accepted soon enough to get published by the end of 2012.

The likelihood that I’ll probably break my streak this year isn’t really any big surprise. I spent the year after I found out my book was getting published leapfrogging from project to project, actually finishing very few complete drafts. Then, I had the baby—need I say more? I’ve only just in the past couple of months started tentatively writing in earnest again, and even so, I still feel like I haven’t found my groove yet. I definitely haven’t gotten my momentum back up, and I’m having trouble deciding which of the many half-finished stories, novels, and children’s books I have going to work on when I sit down to write.

I’ve entered into the awful cycle I was afraid I might enter into before I had the baby: I have very little time to write, and when I do write it all seems like crap to me. So then I feel down about myself as a writer, which in turn makes it difficult to write, which in turn makes me feel even more down about myself as a writer, and so on and so on. When you’re already feeling lousy about your abilities, every little failure makes you really questions yourself. Every rejection, every unwon contest, every job for which you don’t even land an interview—it all gets inflated and overshadows your successes. The negatives aren’t meaningless—I’m receiving sign after pretty clear sign that I still have a ways to go as a writer—but they’re not necessarily more meaningful than your successes—in other words, my failures prove that I’m not “there” yet, but gauging from my successes, I think I’m headed in the right direction.

So to pull myself out of this self-perpetuating cycle of self-loathing, I’m going to try to take some small steps to remind myself that I have control of my own life, and to remind myself, too, of the power of momentum:

1.      I’m going to start exercising again. I’m going to start small—just doing my arms every other day. I know that sounds inconsequential and irrelevant (to a blog about writing), but here’s the thing: exercise and writing are inextricably linked in my mind. My first winter in Fairbanks, Alaska, when I hit rock bottom and made up my mind to get on top of my life, I made two resolutions: to get in shape and to start writing more. By the next winter, I had lost close to thirty pounds and received my first couple of story acceptances. And—until very recently—I’ve kept both resolutions up pretty consistently. For me, now, exercise has become more than a means to stay in shape—it’s the way I keep my life balanced; it’s my way of reminding myself that my life is in my own hands.

I don’t need to lose weight. In fact, it would probably be dangerous for me to do so, since I’m breastfeeding. Though I had worried that having a baby might take a serious toll on my body, I came out of the experience with no stretch marks, and my body snapped back to its previous weight astonishingly fast (a result of A) not having over-gained while I was pregnant, and B) burning an extra thousand or so calories a day due to breastfeeding). I have no real problems with the way I look now, but if I ease myself back into an exercise schedule, I’ll feel better in other ways, ways that go much deeper and matter much more than my physical appearance.

2.      I’m going to try to focus on one project at a time for a little while. I have way too many half-written stories, too many begun but not completed book projects. It’s overwhelming. The hard part will be picking what to focus my attention on, but I think I’ll benefit from just working on one thing until it’s done for a bit. I crave that rewarding feeling you get when you finish something. I need it. And as much as I’m a believer in just working on what you want to work on and not forcing things, I really think, right now, I need to freakin’ finish something, for cripe's sake.

My hope is that if I can take these two, small steps, I’ll be able to slowly but surely pick up speed from there, and soon enough (well, it may take a few months, I’m sure) I’ll have my momentum back up.

In the house across the street from mine lives a small family—a mother, a father, and maybe two or three kids. They have a swingset in their yard, and now that the weather is warm and beautiful, you often see one or two girls swinging away. It reminds me of how much I loved to swing when I was a kid—well, I still love swinging, to be honest. When I was little, I’d spend hours, HOURS, on the swingset in our backyard. I used to bring my little portable CD player out with me and listen to music and swing until either A) a bee would come by and scare me back inside, or B) my mom would call me in for dinner.

Now, I am thirty-one years old. My hair is turning white, one long, wispy strand at a time. I am a mother, a wife, a college instructor. Strange though it seems, I am a grown-up. I’m not sure when that happened, but somewhere along the line, when I was looking the other way, I guess, I passed through childhood, through young adulthood, and ended up here.

As you may have noticed from last week’s post, I’ve been feeling a bit depressed lately about my prospects as a writer/college instructor. These things didn’t bother me that much before I had a baby, but now, at times, I’m completely consumed by my desire to publish more, land a decent job, and generally find a bit of stability for myself and my family. I feel frustrated that my daughter won’t get to grow up with a nice backyard and a swingset, like I did. I feel frustrated that every summer, we don’t even make enough money to cover our basic living expenses (true story: the summer I signed my book contract, we DESPERATELY needed the money I got for my advance. I honestly don’t know what we would have done if that bit of luck hadn’t happened at just the right time. We would have emptied out our savings account well before the end of the summer).

I think to some extent, having published my first book a little over a year ago adds to these feelings. When I first found out I was getting the book published, I thought it was going to create a sort of domino effect for my career. I imagined I could use the fact that I was getting one book published as leverage to get an agent and publish another. Then, with two published books and an agent, I would go out and land myself a full time job, which would afford me a stable enough income that I could write more and more books without the distraction of worrying about money all the time or having to work during the summer.

Of course, that isn’t what happened. It’s hard to say whether having a book published already made any difference when I was querying agents last time around. It may have—at least one agent told me my credentials were “impressive”—but I probably got about the same average of manuscript requests as I did when I was querying agents without a published book under my belt, and,  just like before, all of those still ended in eventual rejection.

And the more time that passes since my book’s publication date, the more I think prospective agents, editors, and employers alike are going to ask, “Alright, but what have you done lately?” I have this overwhelming fear that if I don’t publish another book in the next couple of years, having published a book won’t really matter at all anymore—in terms of being a stepping stone for my career, anyway. If you don’t keep steadily climbing higher on the ladder, the rungs get too slippery and you fall clear off.

But who knows? Maybe I’ll be able to pull myself back onto the ladder. I haven’t fallen off yet, I don’t think. Right now, I’m just sort of dangling, looking down and up and back down again, trying to find some way to regain my purchase. I’ve been writing again, and that’s a good first step. I’ve started submitting again, too: ten submissions a month, just like I used to do. I’m very, very seriously considering applying for PhD programs, and I’m even thinking about trying to get a seat in a graduate level workshop at Ohio University (since Damien’s an employee, I can take classes for half-tuition). Whatever happens, I’m going to try not to let these feelings of failure get the better of me. There is still hope, isn’t there? There is always still hope.

J. T.Dutton is the author of the novels Freaked and Stranded, both published through HarperTeen. I met Dutton a few years ago when she came as a visiting writer to my MFA alma-mater, the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Dutton’s books are quirky and funny and daring—I highly recommend them. I was excited to get a chance to pick her brain about the process of publishing them through such a major publishing house.

Can you tell us a little bit about the process of writing and revising your first book, Freaked? You began working on it as an MFA student, right?

Yes, I submitted Freaked to my MFA workshop as a short story, then expanded it to a novella, then expanded it again to a draft of a novel for my thesis project. After I left Alaska, I dropped it into a drawer. Certain scenes continued to grow and become more mentally realized in my imagination and when I had time, I worked on them. Five years later, I finally stuffed the whole project into an envelope.

For those of us who have an unpublished novel languishing on our hard drives, landing an agent seems like the impossible dream sometimes. How did you hook up with your agent? How long did it take you to sign with your agent after you had begun shopping the book around?

I sent simultaneous blind queries to agents in A Writer’s Guide. (I did not think of Freaked as a Young Adult novel so I chose agents based on their interest in literary fiction.) Jodie Rhodes was maybe number 32 on the list. She asked to see the full manuscript, signed me a few days later, and sold the book in a matter of hours. I was still getting rejections from other agents even as news of the sale was going public in Publishers Weekly.

The seesaw effect of loving my manuscript one day and hating it the next is what kept me from submitting it sooner. Fear of rejection is what often stops me from taking important leaps of faith.

I’ve read that most agents don’t find many clients through the slush pile, preferring instead to meet clients through referrals. Do you have any advice for writers trying to brave the query letter process? What do you think makes a query letter stand out?

I was invited to teach at the Midwest Writers Workshop last summer alongside four agents who presented a panel on the best methods for pitching work. At the end of the conference, all of the agents had requested several full manuscripts and one stated that she’d had some of the best face to face meetings with authors ever. I walked away impressed by how much a one-on-one meeting with an agent can made a difference for aspiring writers. The road to publication requires a lot of collaboration between agent and writer, editor and writer, agent and editor and it makes sense that agents want a sense of who somebody is before they consider signing them.

The typical agent receives nearly 200 blind manuscript queries a week. In lieu of a face to face meeting, a blind query should probably deliver as much of the writer’s personality as possible. Some agents want writers who are market sensitive, others prefer an author who tells a good joke, others are more brass tacks and down to business. Finding the “one” should probably take a while in order for the match to be a success, and query letters should probably not be formula-written, but instead, come from some deep individual and original place.

I have yet to meet Jodie Rhodes face to face though we have exchanged hundreds of e-mails. She recently published a memoir entitled Confessions which describes why she has dedicated herself to the promotion of new authors. If every agent had a manual, figuring out a “personality match” would be a lot easier. Certainly “getting to know” Jodie has deepened my respect for her as a human being and for the work she does.

Tell us about the process of signing the contract with HarperTeen. They loved Freaked so much, they signed you to a two-book deal, right? How much freedom did you have on your second book, Stranded?

Publishers of YA novels frequently sign new authors for more than one book because the bigger contract allows them to plan releases so that the momentum and marketing of the first sells the second. It’s a good deal for writers because having an advance provides a little financial security while they are working. Having the second contract looming over me though managed to stress me out astronomically. I couldn’t dawdle or wait to feel inspired to write. I also had to show my editor a lot of garbage that I hadn’t yet recognized was garbage. I worried every day that she was going to boot me to the curb. I definitely felt like I was “faking it” a good percentage of the time.

Despite time constraints, I received quite a bit of creative freedom to take my second book in the directions I wanted. One of the things I like best about Freaked and Stranded now that they are out in the world is that they don’t fit into a clear YA mold and that they truly represent my take on the genre.

How hands-on has your agent been with your books? And your editor(s)?

I think we put equal parts love into each project.  Author love is different than agent and editor love. I did the writing, Jodie did the selling, and my editor did a truckload of patient reading and recommending.  One of the things I have learned since being published is writing professionally is very collaborative—a lot of thought goes into the finished product. 

Now that both books are out, what’s the next step? Will you continue publishing through HarperTeen?

I have no new projects with HarperTeen in the works though I would lay down my life to publish another book with them. I learned a mountain of useful information under my editor’s tutelage. I can’t even begin to express how much I grew as a writer. Whether my next book will be something she wants is really more her decision than mine. I get the sense that she would potentially read anything new I finished, but her business is an art too and she has to make very judicious decisions about what is the best use of her time.

What’s your relationship with your agent like now that you’ve published both books in your two-book deal? What role does your agent play as you take the next steps in your career?

I keep Jodie apprised of my projects and I get the sense she hopes to see work from me soon. Hopefully, I will oblige. I am in “creative mode” at the moment, where really it’s a time just to shut the door and write.

What are you working on now? Is a third book already in the works?

I have written two half-novels and a quarter of a third since I finished Stranded which have potential but not the full-on magic that I think is going to make them interesting to a perspective publisher yet. I’m not about to give up on them, though. If I’ve learned anything these last few years, it’s that big ideas pull together in mysterious ways. I just have to keep the words flowing, sit down every day and work, and more than likely, something interesting will come from it.

Kathryn Nuernberger is the author of the poetry collection Rag & Bone, which was awarded the Elixir Press Antivenom Prize. Her poetry, which is raw and real and exceptionally well crafted, has appeared in numerous literary journals. She teaches full-time now at Central Missouri University and is the Poetry Editor for Pleiades, but when I met Nuernberger, she was finishing up her PhD in Poetry at Ohio University, where she worked as the Assistant Editor of New Ohio Review and, later, the Editor of Quarter After Eight. In spite of her busy schedule as a professor, editor, and mother of an adorable one-and-a-half year old, Nuernberger found the time to answer some questions about her experience winning a book publication contest.

Can you tell us a little bit about the process of writing and revising Rag & Bone? You hold an MFA and a PhD, right? Were any of the poems in this book included in your thesis or dissertation?

I never had the idea that I was writing a book – that task is so monumental I don’t think I could have written a line if that had been the goal. Instead I spent years writing poems, occasionally pausing to spread all of the ones I liked out on the floor and see if they could be grouped in an elegant and meaningful way. Then I’d submit the result to publishers and go back to writing new poems. I repeated this process every six months or so, taking out weaker poems and putting in newer, better ones. I can remember at least six different titles and arrangements, but there were probably more. There are a few poems from the time when I was working on my MFA that made it into Rag & Bone, and many more from my PhD time.

How did you know when the manuscript was ready to begin sending out?

I definitely began sending out the manuscript before it was ready. But I’m not sure how to avoid that. If I found myself thinking older work was as good as it possibly could be, that would be a sign I’d stopped growing as a writer. Alternatively, if I never had those moments of confidence that I had just written something really great, I’d have to give up writing altogether. This is why I love and am grateful for editors – without them I’d be alone in my attic accepting and rejecting myself willy nilly.

How much research was involved in selecting which contests to enter with this book? There are so many poetry manuscript contests out there—how did you learn about the Antivenom Prize?

I used The Writer’s Chronicle and Poets and Writers to keep track of the upcoming contests. If there were presses I wasn’t already familiar with, I’d check out their catalogue to see if they published the kind of books I want to read.  

What made you decide to enter the Antivenom contest in particular? How did you know your book would be a good fit for Elixir Press?

Elixir seemed like a good fit, because many of the poets they published share my interests in quirky history, scientific factoids, and mythic memory.

Can you talk a little about the editorial process for your book? How closely did your editor work with you once the book had been selected as the winner?

Dana Curtis was a very patient and helpful editor. I’d just finished one of those big overhauls of the manuscript about a month before I found out I’d won the prize, so I sent her a manuscript that had a completely different title, a different ordering of poems, and in some cases, some pretty dramatic revisions of the poems themselves. She shared the revisions with Jane Satterfield, who judged the contest, and they accepted these changes. She also had the manuscript carefully copy edited, which was a great help, since there are a million ways to bungle a comma. And she worked with a designer who did four versions of the cover that I was invited to choose from. I’ve heard horror stories about presses that claim artistic control of the manuscript once it’s been accepted for publication, but I was always included in the decision-making process and my requests were always respected… all the way down to my preference for a serif-font.

What has the press done to get the book in the hands of readers? What have you done personally to market the book?

The press sent out many review copies of the book and also has submitted it to some prizes. I’ve scheduled readings in any city where I can find a couch to crash on.

I’ve long been interested in the difference between an MFA and a PhD—both are considered terminal degrees, though more and more programs these days are looking to hire people with PhD’s. As someone who has been through both types of programs, what do you see as the major differences? Would you encourage writers to get one degree over the other?

I thought of getting an MFA as the secular equivalent to spending two years in a monastery or asherim. I was checking out of the work force for a time to focus my attention on poetry because I thought I would be a happier and more fulfilled person at the end of that process. In the back of my mind there was also the thought that I might be able to work in academia someday, which can be a really supportive environment for writers.  

Because those two MFA years were the first time I had devoted myself so completely to the study and practice of writing, the learning curve was shockingly steep. I did not experience that same degree of explosive growth during the time I worked on my PhD. Instead, the four years I spent in a PhD program were a time of steady growth and more methodical revision. It was also a great time to work with accomplished writers and study alongside talented young writers. One great benefit of getting a PhD for me was that I was sheltered during that period from the financial insecurities of the job market – I didn’t have to worry about whether I would be able to find work as an adjunct from one semester to the next, nor did I have to return to my old job as a high school teacher, which can be very time-consuming and emotionally-draining.  

I would advise creative writers to choose programs that emphasize craft over literary theory -- but that balance varies from program to program and the MA/MFA/PhD distinctions aren’t necessarily the key factor. I would also advise writers to pursue these degrees because they find pleasure in the educational process itself. If the MFA or PhD is only a means to a tenure-track end, the risk of squandering 6-7 years of your life in pursuit of uninsured, low-wage adjunct work is very high.

I know you teach full-time now at the University of Central Missouri, where you also work as the Poetry Editor of Pleiades. Do you still find the time to write? What are you working on now?

Because I’m a mom to a young child, I find that this new job actually allows me more time to write. Greater financial security = more child care. I like to joke that I work 9-5 at the poetry factory. I write from 9-11 every morning, then spend the rest of the day on my teaching and editing responsibilities. For me that steady rhythm is good for the creative process. I just finished up a new manuscript earlier this week. It’s a series of poems based on fragments of an Old Kingdom Egyptian cosmology. But if my experience with my first book was any indicator, I’ll be rewriting the whole thing again in six months.

Kelly Kathleen Ferguson is one of the most accomplished early-career writers I know. Her memoir, My Life as Laura: How I Searched for Laura Ingalls Wilder and Found Myself, was published by Press 53 last fall. Her work has appeared in numerous venues, including The Gettysburg Review and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. Kelly, who’s been extremely busy lately doing interviews and readings to promote My Life as Laura, agreed to answer a few questions for us about the process of publishing her book through a small press. For more details, I recommend you read My Life as Laura—she talks about some of her experiences trying to publish the book at the end.

You talk about it a little bit in your book, but could you describe the process of getting this book published. You were originally being represented by an agent, right?

I was! I had what most writers would call a dream agent, who represented exactly my kind of book (narrative nonfiction), who worked for one of the most established agencies in New York. MFA dream come true!

Then a friend of mine told me about an author who had just signed a book deal with a major NYC publisher about a humorous, narrative nonfiction travelogue where the author planned to retrace the pioneer journey of Laura Ingalls Wilder.

That, by the way, was my book idea.

I tortured myself for a week about whether to tell the agent or not. Part of me wondered how she hadn’t heard about the deal, since my agent was supposed to be the one in the know—not me. In the end I decided to email, which was as much fun as telling your fiancé you had herpes this entire time the night before the wedding. I spent all night tossing and turning and sweating until the phone rang at 9 a.m.

New York city area code.

Her first words were, “I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”

What made you decide to go with a small press rather than seeking representation from another agent?

At the time I believed the agent, that after the NYC publisher had signed Wendy McClure (the “other” author), that no other major publisher would touch my book, because they couldn’t compete with the publicity budget. Probably she was right.

How did you decide which presses to submit to? Did you send out to several, or did you only submit to Press 53? What about Press 53 appealed to you for this project?

I submitted to presses I had heard of: Algonquin, Greywolf, Milkweed, and Press 53.  I owned a book from each of these presses, so I knew they looked professional and represented writers I admire.

I had a personal connection with Kevin Morgan Watson of Press 53, in that he was from North Carolina where I lived for twenty years and he was a friend of a friend of mine. I had first heard of him a few years back when I was first starting to write and I was pleased to see he had been so successful.

What was the editorial process like for this book? Did you work closely with an editor to revise the manuscript?

I’d had many chapters workshopped over the years. I’m grateful for all the advice—from content suggestions to line edits.  One advantage of being in a PhD program, or rather mine in particular, is that I had my adviser Dinty W. Moore read my rough draft. He gave me great big picture feedback. I cut the introduction in half and trimmed 100 pages from the book.

My press editor was Robin Muira. She also worked with me closely, helping me fix the ending, working with copy edits, sharpening language choices, etc. She’s an experienced editor who knew how to shape my book into a professional manuscript.

Most of the bottom line choices, though, were my own. That’s the benefit and the nerve-wracking aspect of working with a small press. I was allowed final say on pretty much all decisions, large and small. But I spent hours, weeks and months pouring over sentences, making sure the book was the best it could be.

One of the main reasons (aside from having an in with the major New York publishers) authors talk about the value of having an agent is to have a professional negotiate a fair contract. This was definitely something that made me nervous when I signed my book contract—I didn’t know what was standard, so I didn’t know whether certain things were just part of the game. Did you feel like you could have used help when it came time to decipher and sign your book contract?

My contract was easy to understand, so not really. I suppose I decided that someone in the small press business probably isn’t in the money racket. I do think a NYC contract would have scared me. Kevin and I from the beginning had what would be called in the Old South “a gentlemen’s agreement” (although technically this would be a gentlemen/lady agreement). I hadn’t even finished the book when he promised to publish it based on a few chapters and an outline. But we hadn’t signed anything.

How is the book being promoted? Has the press been able to market the book at all? What steps have you taken to promote the book?

To avoid repeating myself, I will refer to two blog posts I’ve written on how to be your own book publicist. One I wrote a month after publication and another a bit later. 

I returned recently from a little Alabama tour, which reinforces my advice to use your personal contacts. I have family in Tuscaloosa and friends in Mobile (the Mobile friends build on a Montana MFA friend). The tour confirmed for me that it’s best to read in libraries or small colleges or whatever nice venue you can find. The bookstore has been a pretty big bust for me as a small press author. I had one bookstore employee shut the door in my face. You’d have thought I was hawking copies of The Watchtower. I’ll be honest. I cried.

At most, bookstores agree to carry a few copies. At my last library reading I had a woman come up and want a signed copy for each of her grandchildren—seven!  And with the bookstore cut out of the picture, I made more money. (Press 53 will sell me books at cost). That extra money, combined with places to stay with family and friends, helped me actually clear a little  money on the tour. Crazytalk! I’d still love to work with bookstores, but that hasn’t been the way so far.

For the next book, do you think you’ll go directly to a small press, or will you probably try to sign with an agent?

It will depend on the book I write and what sort of audience I seek. If I write a mainstream book, I would still try for the agent and sign with a big press. I want the publicity budget and the connections. I want distribution to Barnes & Noble, the chance to get on National Public Radio, the opportunity to be reviewed in major newspapers, nominated for major book awards, etc.  That being said, I’ve had a positive experience working with a small press, and it’s great to see small presses doing so well. Small presses are receiving more and more attention and winning more awards.  The difference between "small" and "large" presses shortens every year. So, let's see what I write next and what's happening then.

What are you working on now? I know you write fiction as well. Will your next book project be another memoir, or do you think you’ll go a different route?

So far I’ve been working on a book about Jack, as in Jack Squat and Jack Daniels. Finishing the book and promoting the book has drained me. But on my trip to Alabama I began feeling that spark again, writing notes and taking pictures. I might feel another travelogue/memoir coming on. That’s kind of a bummer because I was looking forward to writing fiction again. Perhaps a Young Adult mystery. We’ll see.

You know me—I love metaphors for writing and the writing life. We’ve all heard that a writing project is like the writer’s child: you love it with all your heart, you’ve poured so much of yourself into it, you feel protective of it, etc. etc. etc. Now that I have a child of my own, I can see how fitting this metaphor really is.

See, when you have a newborn baby, you love her right away—yes, you love her madly—but . . . well, she’s just sort of lump of flesh at first. At first, she doesn’t do much of anything but eat, defecate, sleep, and cry, cry, cry. She doesn’t have much of a personality yet. In fact, in many ways, a newborn baby is still sort of a fetus. The human brain is so large that babies must be born before they’re actually developed so they can fit through the mother’s cervix. It’s true! Most (or maybe all, I can’t remember) other animals are FAR more developed by the time they’re actually born. Just think about all those baby animal births you’ve seen on PBS, where the second the baby is born, he begins walking.

So when a baby human is born, like a new writing project, she isn’t really anything yet, just an untapped ball of potential. Now what I’ve already discovered is that if you try to force things with your baby—if you, for example, want to convince her to play with a certain toy before she’s developed an interest in it herself—you’ll get nowhere. You have to let baby take the lead. She’ll let you know what she wants to do by trying different things and paying close attention to how she reacts to them. If she doesn’t want that toy, or if she doesn’t want to be read to just now, she’ll cry. Then you stop and try something else or take a break and just snuggle for a while.

As time goes by and you let her dictate what she wants to do and when, she begins to develop and become more of a human being, less an exposed fetus. She starts to show preferences (my little Amalie, for example, loves her Winnie the Pooh with jingle bells in his belly, which her Nonnie and Bapa bought for her at Disneyland); she even starts to smile! And you become more and more attuned to who she is and how to be with her.

This is how a new piece of writing develops. In my experience, if you try to force your preconceived notions of what the piece will be, it just won’t work. If, instead, you sit back and let the piece guide you, experimenting with different things and paying close attention to what works and what doesn’t, things will come together much more smoothly, though they may not come as quickly as you want.

My Amalie is now almost eight weeks old. Eight weeks. Already, she’s so different than she was eight weeks ago when I gazed into her blue, blue eyes for the first time; still, she has a long way to go before she’s ready to function out in the real world on her own. If I were to call up, say, an employment agency and ask them to secure a job for my eight-week-old baby, they’d either think I was joking or crazy. Yet this, essentially, is what many amateur writers do when they submit a rough draft for publication (and proofreading to catch the grammar and punctuation errors does not turn a first draft into a final draft, as any English teacher will tell you).

I’m not saying you have to spend eighteen years revising every single piece, but hey, let’s not rush things, okay? Your “baby” will develop exactly as quickly as is right for it, and one day you’ll be able to send it out into the real world proud of all the work you put into it and knowing that you both are much better for the experience.

Last week I talked about the frustration of receiving mostly negative feedback as a writer. This week I thought I’d touch on how I manage to keep myself going in the face of all that rejection. Different writers deal with their steady stream of rejections in different ways. Some even save every rejection they ever receive; some even put them on display!

One of my instructors at UAF had a box containing not only rejections but acceptances and other writing related correspondence, like the letter he received from a literary agent who had read one of his stories in a journal and was interested in representing him, or the letter from an editor informing him he had been nominated for a Pushcart. He let us, one day after workshop, paw through it. This was an award winning writer, mind you, with two books published and a full-time, tenured position as an MFA instructor, and he had plenty of letters in that box that would seem in line with those facts . . . but he also had plenty of rejections.

The most striking thing about the collection was the fact that he hadn’t separated the negative from the positive, and seeing all the rejections mixed together with the positive feedback was a valuable reminder that it’s all just part of being a writer. Neither the rejections nor the acceptances were given extra weight in this box—it was just a memory box, mementos of his career as a writer.

I thought it was inspiring, but still, me personally? I don’t save rejections unless they are encouraging personal rejections. In fact, the first rejection I ever received bothered me so much I couldn’t stop obsessing about it even after I’d ripped it up and thrown it away. Just knowing that the pieces of it were still there in the garbage kept the wound open until the garbage bag was safely carted away to the dump.

Obviously, that was years ago, and I’ve received enough rejections since then to develop the writer’s version of a guitarist’s calloused fingers. I don’t take  rejections personally and I don’t dwell on them . . . but I don’t save them either. I log them then delete them and, unless they include some bit of useful feedback that I can use for revision, I try never to think about them ever again.

I do, however, save encouraging responses. Acceptances I print and put in a file. Encouraging personal rejections and other positive feedback (the couple of “fan” emails I’ve gotten, for example, from people who felt compelled to email me and tell me how much they liked a story they’d come across in a journal) I save in an email folder. I save this type of thing because just knowing that they’re there helps bring me up again when too many form rejections (or low book sales) has gotten me down. I wish I could say I didn’t need this sort of masturbatory ego massage, but the truth is, sometimes you just have to find any way you can to prove to yourself that it is worth the time and energy you put in, that you should keep writing, even if X editor or Y agent doesn’t seem to agree.

Recently, I closed down an old email address and had to forward any saved messages that I wanted to keep to my new email. The sheer number of saved emails in my encouraging responses folder gave me a much needed boost in self-esteem, and as I read through them again trying to decide whether I should really forward them all, I started to feel even better. This happened, by the way, at a time where I’ve been the most unsure of myself as a writer. The anti-climax of the book deal, the pregnancy, and now the new baby have left me really questioning my abilities as a writer. I’m so glad I saved all of those emails over the years, even if for just that one moment where I would stumble across them again and be reinvigorated.

For the record, I did decide to forward every single one. I may need them again one day. In fact, I know I will.

I don’t know about you, but the majority of the feedback I ever receive as a writer comes in the form of rejections or acceptances. This is unfortunate, since, let’s be honest, for every one acceptance a writer might receive, he or she probably received several rejections for the same piece. The result is that the vast majority of the feedback we ever get comes in the form of rejections.

Of course, all rejections are not created equal. A personal rejection, complete with a note explaining why the piece was rejected or complimenting you on some specific aspects of the story feels almost as uplifting and encouraging as an acceptance. But of course, a stiff and reserved form rejection—especially the sort that doesn’t even encourage you to submit again!—can feel like a fierce, deliberate kick in the shins.

They say that rejections and acceptances are not evenly weighted. “It only takes one acceptance,” well-meaning friends will tell you, shrugging at you and then promptly changing the subject. This is true. One acceptance means a hell of a lot more than twenty rejections combined. The acceptance means the piece is going to actually get out there. The acceptance means, also, that someone, somewhere thought the piece was good enough to share with a readership. A rejection might mean the piece isn’t any good; it might mean the piece has potential but isn’t ready; it might mean nothing, though, nothing at all. It might just mean the issue was full when your piece came in and so the editor read your submission just looking for any reason, any reason at all, to reject it.

Even so, it can be discouraging when the feedback you receive on your writing is mostly negative. This problem is compounded if you’re like me: having published my first book—and won a contest for it, no less—I’ve had to deal with the reality that a book publication doesn’t mean anybody will actually buy or read the book. You’d think having a book out there might help tilt the feedback scale to the positive side, but if anything, the silence feels ever louder now.

Since resuming sending out my work after getting my book published (I had to take a break because all of my stories that were ready were now taken), I’ve received mostly form rejections. Okay, I’ve gotten one acceptance and a handful of personal rejections, but most of my responses have been a formal one or two sentences: “Thanks for your submission. Unfortunately . . .” A friend of mine was wondering if maybe I’ve been aiming too high since getting the book published, that maybe the book gave me an extra dose of confidence that caused me to submit to higher ranked, harder to get into journals. In fact, the opposite is true. I’ve been concerned with building up more of an online presence and have been mostly submitting to tiny online journals. I suppose that fact makes the rejections smart even more: these journals don’t even get that many submissions, and they’re sending me form rejections. Ouch!

So yeah, I’ve been feeling a bit discouraged as a writer lately. It’s frustrating to fall back down to a point where I mostly receive form rejections. The feedback ratio problem is, I think, probably the hardest thing about being a writer. It’s hard to put so much time and effort into a story, only to receive a series of indifferent responses, and it’s hard to motivate yourself to keep going when the majority of the feedback you receive is negative. But I guess it’s important to remember that all writers must go through this, even the best writers, even your favorite writers of all time. And we should all remember, too, that getting over this hump, that sticking to it and keeping going in the face of constant rejection, is what sets the people who will end up being successful apart from the other, would-be but won’t-be, failed writers.

I received this week what feels like the hundredth agent rejection for the novel that was my MFA thesis, this novel I’ve poured so much time and energy into over the past five years. This was another rejection from an agent who had, after reading my initial query, been interested in the manuscript and had requested a partial. Rejections from agents who actually requested to read some or all of the manuscript first are the hardest because they force you to accept that it’s not that you’re not getting a fair shake, it’s not that the agent just didn’t like your premise, it’s the writing, it’s the manuscript itself that brought on this rejection.

Naturally, this rejection was no exception. In fact, this rejection smarted even more than the other rejections for partial or full manuscripts I’ve received in the past because this one didn’t waste any time complimenting my writing abilities. The gist of it was that I have some “impressive” writing credits and an “interesting” premise, but this particular agent just wasn’t that into the material itself once he started reading it. I guess I’ve gotten used to the obligatory variation on, “You’re a very good writer, however . . .” and so this one pierced my rejection-toughened skin and actually stung a bit.

But let’s be honest here, the fact that this agent didn’t have time to waste stroking my ego isn’t the real reason this rejection hurt. It hurt because I’ve queried so many agents about this book, and I’ve had a fair number of partial or full manuscript requests—hell, I even had an agency solicit me after reading one of my stories in a literary journal—but I always end up getting nowhere. Many agents have been kind enough to take a look; none of them have been interested in representing me after they read the manuscript.

I’m at that point, of course, where I have no choice but to accept that this book just isn’t going to get published. Shelving a project you’ve poured so much of yourself into is maybe the most difficult thing a writer has to do. This time it’s particularly hard for me because I’ve done the set-it-aside-for-six-months thing—more than once—and still felt it was good when I came back to it. I’ve revised it so many times I’ve completely lost count, too. When I read through this novel, even now, I don’t understand why it isn’t publishable. Okay, it’s not the most brilliant novel ever written, but it seems good enough to me to get published. It seems just as good as a lot of the stuff that gets published every year. But I’m clearly missing something; there’s something wrong that I’m not picking up on.

I feel I would be deluding myself if, after all these rejections, I don’t admit defeat. I’ve talked in the past about the agent hunt being my first stop for this book, about how, if that didn’t work out for me, I would try my hand at small presses. In fact, I had already stopped querying agents (this rejection took several months to make its way to me and is from the last agent I had yet to hear from), and I had begun to submit to small presses and contests, but now I’m thinking maybe that, too, is a bad idea.

I know several people who have permanently set aside their MFA theses, accepting that the manuscripts just aren’t good enough and never will be. This may sound sort of pessimistic, until you realize that those same people are instead investing their writing time working on new projects, projects they do feel might have a chance of getting published. Giving up on their theses, for these writers, wasn’t, actually, like giving up at all; it was more like accepting that the thesis was a valuable experience, great practice, and now they’re ready to move on and apply what they learned to something better.

I really, really, really admire that mentality. I really, really, really want to know how to let go of this novel, at last. I’ve given up on projects in the past—this is not, after all, my first novel, just the first one I actually believed, after several years of close scrutiny and revision, was good enough—so why is this so difficult for me? One way or another, though, I have got to accept that it isn’t going to happen with this book. Researching publishers and crafting queries is taking up valuable time I should be spending on new projects, not to mention the fact that, as long as I continue to think of this book as publishable, it will be difficult for me to fully immerse myself in a new novel. Every time I try, I eventually hit a wall and get sidetracked by thinking about this book, whether I should revise it again, whether I should be bothering with a new one when this one has yet to be published.

So I need to move this novel to my “Failed Attempts” file, dust my hands off, and move on with my life. As difficult as this is for me, maybe it will be like a sort of release. Here’s hoping. On the positive side, anyway, I do feel very heartened by this final rejection’s admission that my writing credits are “impressive.” It gives me some hope that, while this novel, it seems, just isn’t going to cut it, maybe a future one will, and that I have built up enough of a publication history for agents to pause and take notice. Maybe the next novel will be the one. I’ll never know, though, if I allow myself to remain frozen in the world of this old, let’s face it, failed novel.