According to my Submittable account and other calculations, my work has been rejected 68 times since 2011. That’s an average of 5.2 rejections per year.
And the flip side, my acceptances at 26.
Does that seem kind of low? Am I writing at all?
Have you heard about writers who claim to be writing everyday? I may even know some. But I am not one of them. I guess I have been known to write consecutively, a few days in a row.
I have seen in some FB writing-focused groups occasional calls for poets to “brag” their rejections and I see the magazine and journal list of where writers send their work, and think to myself: “Wow, there’s a lot of magazines out there! Why am I not sending out more work?”
But this thought is fleeting because reality check: it takes a lot of brain and emotional energy to write the work you would want to send out. The kind of writing you want published next to your byline demands your total attention and willingness to edit down to the bone. I mean whittle that shit down so it doesn’t annoy; offers insight; allows pause for thought. And that is a lot of work.
I haven’t made any New Year’s resolutions to write MORE, but I did finish the manuscript for Book 4 and am working on Book 5.
Not to say anyone will read these Cinder Ella-wants-to-be-Cinderella books, but that did not/will not stop me from writing them. (You would think I would have learned my lesson from publishing books 1 through 3). Book 4 is about my hang up with being in the Diaspora; Book 5 will be heavily influenced by Grace M. Cho's Haunting the Korean Diasopora. Her research focuses on transgenerational trauma passed down to all of us Koreans in the form of a very pissed off woman ghost. Or ghosts. If you're Korean, you can think of any female relation and surmise their violation if they were alive during Japanese Colonialism and now American Military Occupation.
You say you don't have a ghost? Don't worry, I'm here.
Painting credit: Max Beck
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