Nathan Bransford had a post today on dealing with rejection. And, with impeccable timing, I received a rejection today.
So here's how I deal with it:
- I allow myself to grieve. For between 1 hour and 1 day. But it's one day tops. Because it does hurt, and acknowledging the hurt is important.
- After 1 sleep, it's get back on the horse time. Whether by writing something, or sending out a new query.
- If there was any useful feedback in the rejection, I might send a quick thank you note if it was an e-mail rejection. But never any questions or requests for clarification. Just the "thanks, I really appreciate the feedback". Because I do. It's so much better than a form rejection, I like to encourage the rejecter to keep providing that type of feedback to others.
- Then I sit on the feedback for a bit before deciding how to edit for it (if at all). This is because the one time I edited right away, the response was too knee-jerk and I wound up embarrassing myself and not doing the book any favours.
And then I go trawling blogs like Nathan's for stuff like Bizkit the sleepwalking dog (also courtesy of Nathan). Because Bizkit's so funny that even though I first viewed him in the morning, as I fell asleep that evening he went galumping across the back of my eyelids and made me burst into giggles that earned me strange looks from husband and cat.
Because laughter is the best medicine for a rejection.
