So It Goes

I read Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five in high school. I probably read it for an English class, though I can’t say for sure because I liked it enough that I bought several of his books and read them, too. At this point, it’s been long enough that I only remember vague details about Slaughterhouse-Five. One thing I remember well is the sentiment so it goes, which Vonnegut uses throughout the novel. People die, buildings are bombed, war happens, and all the main character thinks about all these things is so it goes. The expression is either devoid of emotion, the MC so desensitized to everything around him, or is so full emotion too deep for the MC to otherwise express. Maybe, if I were to go back and read the novel, I’d have a better grasp of the expression than my faulty memory currently allows. Maybe not.

But the point of that expression isn’t whether I remember it right, at least not for this blog post. It’s about what I remember feeling as I read those words back in high school. And what I remember is the helplessness, wrapped up in the well, shit, there’s nothing I can do so I best move on.

This is about how I feel now when I get rejections. The most recent of those rejections wasn’t even from an email or an agent—it was the Authoress posting the winners of her #BLOGPITCH contest…and I wasn’t among them. At first, I felt a sharp disappointment. Then, like I’ve come to feel with so many rejections over the past year or so, I shrugged my shoulders and thought so it goes.

So it goes.

Because each rejection has no impact on other contests or other agents. A email rejection from an agent and a loss of a contest are about the same thing, and neither will prevent me from continuing on. So much of this writing world is subjective that even if several people hate something, so many others may love it.

As for the #BLOGPITCH loss specifically, I don’t think my pitch was bad. (Or, well, maybe it was. See here.) Authoress may have liked other pitches better, or better liked the concept behind the other pitches. Or she might not have picked me for some other reason. There’s no way to know for sure.

While not knowing the reason for rejection used to bother me, I’m number to it now. (So it goes, remember.) Or, at least, I don’t let it bother me for as long or as much as it used to. I think this is because I know there’s always another contest, or in the case of queries, always another agent to email. And if I run out of agents or contests, I can always write another novel. I’ve done it before. I can do it again. And someday, if I’m lucky, I’ll write the right one.