Plan A's Dark Thoughts

A few days ago, I posted that I don’t like to blog. Well, today—and only for today—I’m taking those words back. I want to blog today. In fact, I NEED to blog. Because being rejected from a writing contest might not be the end of your writing world, but it sure feels like it.

The contest I’m talking about is the same one I’ve been blogging about intermittently for weeks. Baker’s Dozen 2013. The winners for the YA/MG portion were emailed today and I didn’t get an email. I’m out. I wrote my last blog post about the possible outcomes for the contest: Plan A meant I’d carry on the way I’ve been carrying on for months; Plan B meant I’d move on to the next round of the contest and agents would be looking at my entry. I hoped a little too much for Plan B, I think, but obviously, it’s Plan A. And Plan A, quite frankly, sucks.

Here’s the thing about Plan A. It means The Authoress and Jodi Meadows didn’t like my entry. In reality this means that these two people saw at least thirty-five other entries that they liked better—subjectively better. It means that just these two people rejected my entry. Still, it feels like the entire writer/agent world has rejected WORLD’S EDGE before I’ve even sent out queries. I was always in the top percent or two academically in high school and college, but this rejection feels like it means I’m nowhere near the top in my writing. I can’t even see the top of writing from here. And this means I’ll never be published. Never.

If you think I’m bragging about my GPA, I’m not. It seemed like high school and college were all about memorization and regurgitation, two things I guess I was good at. I got good grades in every subject, not any particular one. That means I was good at everything but NOT GREAT AT ANYTHING. This is important. This is why I struggled so much deciding where to go to college and what to do when I graduated. Creative writing, you see, wasn’t really emphasized in high school or college. In fact, I remember writing a Christmas story for a high school class and the teacher HATED it. She wrote in scrawled red across half a page about all the reasons she didn’t like it.

I’ve always been passionate about writing, but never had any real feedback about whether I’m any good at it. Even in my creative writing seminar my senior year of college, it was hard to tell what the other students thought of my writing. Not that I blame them: I’ve read it since and am not impressed. So it’s pretty easy to see why I chose to go the science route when it came to jobs post-college. It’s how I ended up here, making flavors. (And yes, I’m typing this post between flavors because I really need to get this out of my system.) The thing about flavors? I like making them. I like this job. I could be fine doing this job forever.

But there’s a huge difference between fine and happy. Flavors are fine. Writing is happy. Writing makes me so happy that I wish I were amazing at it so that I could get published and make a career out of it. It’s why I keep doing this painful query thing. It’s why I entered the contest. And it’s why it hurts that I got rejected from the contest—a sure sign that my writing just isn’t good enough. It may be good, but it’s not GREAT. In order to be published, I need GREAT.

Of course I’ll keep trying. IT WAS JUST ONE CONTEST, just two people, just one rejection. But it’s dark and rainy today with clouds crowding the river and the skyscrapers of downtown Cincinnati. It’s atmospheric weather, the kind that makes you like being depressed and pessimistic. It’s a dark and twisty day. It’s a day that makes me want to give up. It’s a day that makes me think this is my writing future: I’ll try and try and try to get published and IT’LL NEVER HAPPEN. This makes me think I’m masochistic or something, but by definition that means I’ll not stop trying. I WILL KEEP ON. But not today.