And cried when I failed to place in a writing competition. Not to mention the tears of frustration trying to overcome brain injury symptoms in order to write...
If you care that much about something tears are sometimes inevitable. And you have to care that much to withstand the inevitable lows of your journey as a writer.
The highs are fantastic- getting your first full request, the call, your first five star review, the nice email from a reader, watching your rankings rise...
But whether you're published or unpublished you will know about the lows - the rejections, not placing in a competition, a horrible review, an annoying comment from an Internet troll that you have to ignore, watching your rankings fall...
When you're hurtling down that roller coaster you just have to grit your teeth, accept you're never going to please all the people all the time and know that as quickly as you're falling you'll be rising again soon.
I came across this fabulous list on Buzfeed. It lists the number of times famous authors have been knocked back: http://www.buzzfeed.com/stmartinspress/20-brilliant-authors-whose-work-was-initially-reje-7rut
Read it, hold your head high and ride that roller coaster
:-)
And if you want an example of how quickly fortunes can be reversed read my call story: http://minxesofromance.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/sub-to-sale-in-24-hours-my-call-story.html
Lorraine Wilson is currently completing her third Chalet Girl book for Harper Impulse.
http://smarturl.it/secretchalet
2 comments:
This is so true! The scary thing is that once you get that publishing contract, you think your down times are over - that it's just upward from there. Little did I realise how untrue that was.
Definitely! I wasn't prepared ;-)
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