rejections Archives - Elizabeth Maria Naranjo

Posted on September 18, 2015 ·

Image from Flickr by Brenda Clarke

This morning after dropping the kids off at school, I headed to Xtreme Bean Coffee Co., determined to catch up on the one class I’ve fallen behind in (one out of five—not bad, right?). I ducked into the dimly-lit vault (the building was formerly a bank) and planted myself in a corner, vowing that after I checked my email—just this once!—I’d focus only on reading my assigned short stories and scribbling annotations on a legal pad.

Good thing I checked my email. The instructor had sent out a notice postponing the due date for the assignment by one week. And I needed that, because what I really wanted to do today was write a blog post.

Most of you who follow me here are writers, and writers never get tired of talking about one thing—rejection. I’ve written about it before, and how rejections usually don’t bother me. But yesterday I received one that bothered me a lot, and I want to tell you why so you don’t make the same mistakes I made.

The first mistake was letting my number of pending submissions dwindle down to one. Don’t do this. It’s important to keep multiple submissions going so that you don’t pin all your hopes on one single response. There have been times when I’ve received acceptances for stories that I’d nearly forgotten were out there because I had so many circulating, and that’s a nice feeling.

My other mistake was believing that a long response time meant something. Twice I’ve had stories take longer than usual to come back, and when they did it was with personalized notes from editors encouraging me to send more, and admitting that it had taken so long because the work had been carefully considered (although ultimately turned down).

In the case of yesterday’s rejection, it took nine months to arrive, and having previously submitted to this magazine I knew they were pretty good about sticking to their ideal turn-around time of three months. So at about the half-year mark I started envisioning my little story being passed up the chain of editors, all the way to the top, and my hopes climbed too.

But sometimes the reason for a longer than usual response time is simply this: the editors are buried beneath their slush piles. When that happens it’s very likely that all you’re going to get after nine months or even a year of waiting is a form rejection. Which is what I got yesterday.

Which is okay. The key is not to wait.

In case you missed it, my short YA piece “We Never Get to Talk Anymore” was published last month in YARN, a fantastic magazine publishing literature about young adults, and also by young adults. Check it out and let me know what you think!

It Only Takes One “Yes”

Posted on December 7, 2014 ·

Image from Flickr by jepoirrier

Friday was the anniversary of a pretty special occasion for me. On that day, three years ago, I received my first acceptance letter, for a short story called “Eleven Seconds.”

I will never forget the moment I received that email. It was a cold December evening, and we were gathered around the fireplace. I remember when I saw the subject line I cried out, and Abbey, who was nine years old, thought something was wrong. Then I hugged her and I hugged my son and I hugged my husband. I would have hugged you too, had you been there.

I’d been writing stories since grade school, but it wasn’t until my thirties that I began seriously submitting my work. Sometime after my son was born I just decided to go for it. I decided my dream of turning the title “aspiring writer” into “published author” was a good dream, and it deserved to happen, and the only way it would happen was if I stopped hiding behind the idea of it and actually put my work out there.

So I did, and I spent years collecting rejection slips. They didn’t bother me as much as you’d think. Simply corresponding with editors made me feel as if I were moving forward. It put me in a different category of writers. There are those who think about submitting their work, and then there are those who submit their work. Only writers from the second category get their work published, and the rejections they collect along the way become a kind of badge of honor.

I’d heard that once a writer breaks through, the acceptance letters start coming in pretty regularly. And that was true for me–within a month I had another one, and more would soon follow.

But there will always be rejections. Nearly everything I’ve had published was rejected first.

For example, “Eleven Seconds” was rejected three times. The Fourth Wall was rejected twenty-two times. Don’t worry too much about how many times you hear “No,” because it only takes one “Yes.”

Don’t give up.

Here’s the text of my little story that could, which originally appeared in SLAB literary magazine in the spring of 2012. Read it, if you like, and then go submit one of yours.

ELEVEN SECONDS

It started in the kitchen. A clinking of porcelain, a delicate, dreadful trembling, cups and saucers and unused dinner plates jumping in the cupboards like those little beans from Mexico. What were those called?

Thunder ripped the ground and the old man jerked up from his chair, instinctively, but the fear passed through him like a bullet. His heart fluttered once. He sat back down.

From his seat in the living room, the old man watched his kitchen heave forward and burst apart. The world could shatter around you; he knew that. Bending forward, he plucked a fragment of china from the ground, like a flower. His wife, Winnifred, had painted this piece, before the cancer took her last year. He could see her clearly, her pale knotted hand curled around the thin brush, looping and twirling like a dancer. The old man pressed his hands together and folded them over the broken china, like a prayer.

Thanks for reading!