I Wish I Knew Why

Several people thanked me for my last post (Marshmallow Persistence) because it was positive and inspirational. That was a good day—the Veronica Mars movie came out and by all accounts on the Pitch Madness contest side of things, I didn’t know if I was in or out.

Well, I’m out. I’m not surprised. If you’ve read other posts, you know I didn’t get into other contests. Some people have contest success and some don’t. It’s the way of things…but I wish I knew why. I want to know if my pitch was weak, if there were too many other manuscripts for my genre, if my first 250 words didn’t catch the readers’ attention, if my genre wasn’t on specific agent wish lists. The thing about contests—most anyway—is that you never find out why you weren’t in.

While I followed the contest feed closely since submitting my entry, I’m not following it anymore. It’s hard to read about others’ success and congratulations. It’s hard when you can’t ask the slush readers and blog hosts what made other entries better than yours. It’s hard to know you don’t quite measure up. I can’t stop going through my entry in my head wondering just where I went wrong, if I went wrong at all.

You can have a solid pitch, a great 250, and still not make it into contests like Pitch Madness. This should make me feel better, but it doesn’t. For every positive and inspirational post I write, I’ve a dozen others that aren’t so upbeat but never make it to my blog. I’ve heard you’re supposed to keep that stuff to a minimum—after all, you never know who’s reading what and you’ve gotta keep a good image of yourself out there.

Still, rejection is hard.  Rejection days are the bad days. They’re the days where you want to put your head down on your desk or crawl under your covers and hide. They’re the days you wish it rained and rained and you could curl up with a book you love and disappear into another world. They’re the days you want to give up.

But I’m not giving up. I’ve said it thousands of times and I’ll say it again. I’M NOT GIVING UP. Today, as soon as I post this, I’ll pretend this writing world doesn’t exist. I won’t think about my entry, about whether my manuscript is good enough, about my other failed finished manuscripts, about what I’ll do tomorrow. Today, I’ll have a green beer and say thanks for St. Patrick’s Day, my brother, all the good things in my life.

Tomorrow, I’ll go back to finishing revisions on the manuscript I entered for Pitch Madness. I’ll turn my attention to March Madness while I prep my query. And then, sometime soon, I’ll send out a few queries, and then a few more, and then a few more. I’ll bury the bad days and look forward to good ones, knowing they’re out there somewhere if I just keep going.