Firstly, it’s overcast and rather blah out there. My mood is strongly connected to the weather, more so in recent years than in the past. It’s really making me dreary and ass-draggy. For obvious reasons, that’s not my favorite.

It’s also my volunteer day in a grade two classroom. Usually I find that time energizing, positive and fun, but sometimes when you see the issues, huge issues, that these kids are having to deal with it’s depressing. They are seven years old for goodness sake, they shouldn’t need to worry about these sorts of things. I, obviously, can’t go into details, but I’m sure you can all use your imaginations. Teachers — I commend you. Truly. For some kids school is the only safe or stable place they have. It’s -so- important!

Sadly, many of the kids who struggle the most with reading are the ones who would benefit most from being able to do it — to use it as a sort of escape. That really shows me that the little bit of time I spend every week with them is important, seeing them progress is usually very rewarding… Today was hard though.

Plus, some people (of the grown-up variety) I care about are going through some tough times and having to make difficult decisions today. I’m keeping them in my thoughts too. They’ve got it harder than I, no question at all, but they are borrowing a little bit of my energy too (even if they don’t know it).

It might sound as though I’m feeling sorry for myself, and I’m not. I’m just pretty low energy/motivation. As much as I adore zombies on somedays I feel like I belong more amung their number than that of the living. Today is one of those days.

Speaking of zombies, I’m not all gloom and doom today despite how it may seem. One of my zombie poems, White Noise, was published at Everyday Weirdness today. Yay! I love this poem, it’s one of my favorites in my slowly-increasing zombie collection. I hope you’ll read it and like it too.

If you write for publication you will get rejected. People, no matter how awesome thay are, may not understand the extent of that or how it affects you unless they are also writers. Jo is fantastic. He is incredibly supportive of me and my writing. Wholly and completely. Yet, I remember a year or two ago I was happy about receiving a personalised rejection from an agent. Jo made some sort of joke, I don’t remember it exactly, what I remember is what it helped coalesce in my brain. That is this: As I writer I deal with a ridiculous amount of rejection. In order to stay sane and be able to keep doing this I need to learn to celebrate every victory, no matter how small. That means personal rejections.

It’s true.

My acceptance ratio, according to Duotrope’s Digest, for the past twelve months is 27.27%. I think this is a bit of an aberration based on the fact I’m not submitting as much so far this year than last. Last year my acceptance ratio was about 15%. Let’s play with that number. A 15% acceptance ratio means that people are telling me no 85% of the time. I send out ten pieces I get told eight (and a half) times. Crazy! You need to develop a “thick skin” or find a way to deal with rejection if you’re going to keep plugging away in the face of that. As if that weren’t bad enough, I’m told by Duotrope’s Digest that my acceptance ratio is higher than the average for people submitting to the same markets as me. That means I’m stinking lucky to be accepted 15% of the time.

Lucky.

Compounding the number of rejections we, as writers, have to deal with is the way we perceive those rejections. We give them so much more weight than they deserve. Truly. For example, one of the people who co-wrote the poem “Alone” which we sold to Sorcerous Signals blogged about it recently and said something about the huge number of rejections the piece recieved before being sold. He, Arnold Emmanuel, actually said, and I quote:

…Rhonda sent out submission requests and omg, lots of rejection letters.  I thought to myself “Oh well, it won’t be published, that’s okay, least we tried,” and then one day all of a sudden I get an email that says something like “Remember that poem Alone we worked on,” and I’m thinking oh, and another rejection letter, but no, we got published!

How many rejection letters did we collect on the poem before selling it? How many ‘nos’ did we get before he figured ‘Oh well…’ and gave up on that poem being published? Two. Two. And not two markets that are easy to place work with either. I’m talking about Lone Star Stories and Goblin Fruit.

Now, lest it seem like I’m picking on Arnold, I’m not. I’m merely using his words to show how subjective our perception of rejection is because I think we give it too much power. I’ve another friend who wrote a story with the intention of submitting it to a specific market, sent it to that market and got turned down. His reaction is to trunk the story. I was shocked. Really? All that work and you’re going to say ‘Oh well…’ and give up on it after one submission? See? Again, giving a rejection notice too much power.

As an editor I can tell you, someone passing on your submission does not mean the submission is bad. It really doesn’t. Honest, honest, honest.

Remember Heinlein’s rules for writing*?

1. You must write.
2. You must finish what you write.
3. You must refrain from rewriting, except to editorial order.
4. You must put the work on the market.
5. You must keep the work on the market until it is sold.

I tend to disagree with #3, but as for 4 & 5 he’s so right. Okay, occasionally I will stop submitting a story and trunk it, for whatever reason, but not after only a handful of rejection notices.

Rejection is a part of writing for publication. It’s something we all need to deal with and the better our coping skills are the more likely we are to succeed because, when it comes down to it, perseverance is a HUGE ingredient in the recipe for success in this industry.

When I first started submitting my work I picked ‘easier’ markets who had higher acceptance ratios than others. I didn’t mind if I didn’t get paid then, I just wanted to see my name in print. For me, that was a good way to go because it allowed me to deal with rejection on a smaller scale than I would have been if I’d started out submitting to pro markets. Slowly, over time as my confidence built my standards rose. Now I don’t submit to markets that don’t offer me some sort of payment and I enjoy sending my stuff to the tougher markets. It’s a challenge. (Just wait until they start saying yes, then there will be a hell of a party here at the Parrish household )

I also, like I told Jo so long ago, deal with rejection by celebrating my victories, even the little ones. Every acceptance, every personal rejection, every sincere compliment for my work is worthy of celebration, and gets it. As for when something gets rejected, my favorite way to deal with that is to immediately send it out again. Then, instead of dwelling on the rejection and feeling bad I can feel hopeful and optimistic about potential acceptance at the new market.

A friend of mine did a blog entry about rejection recently and asked if it ever stops stinging, even a little bit. For me the answer is yes. I am disappointed when someone passes on a piece I’ve sent them, but I’m not hurt. There’s a distance between myself and my writing that wasn’t there in the begining, and an understanding that really, sometimes stories and poems just aren’t a good fit. It doesn’t mean they aren’t a good read.

How do you deal with rejection?

On a related, but happier note, I sold a zombie poem, “Fluffy” to Diakaijuzine this morning. Yay!

*Robert J. Sawyer added a 6th rule that I think is fabulous. That rule being “Start work on something else.”

Also, a while back a group of us from NaNoLJers worked together on a group poetry project. The result is the poem “Alone“, which we sold to Sorcerous Signals. That poem went live at the beginning of the month. For anyone who reads Niteblade the style of the artwork accompanying our poem may look familliar — it was done by Marge Simon. I love her work so it was an honor to have her illustrate mine (again ).

One of the best parts about writing “Alone” and getting it published is that it is the first paid publishing credit of a couple of my fellow poets. It made me happy to be involved in their first publication. Very happy.

If you write what was your first publication?

Mine was a short poem, a rictameter, in a little magazine called ‘The Storyteller’. They didn’t pay anything, in fact the publication cost me money because my ego demanded I buy a copy of the magazine*. The poem was called ‘Snowflakes’ and was sweet little piece about walking in the snow. The thing is it wasn’t until after it was published that I realised the syllable count on the poem was wrong. Oops.

*Note to self: This is a good topic for a blog entry in the future.

This Halloween Danica was an ‘infected’ which is sort of like a proto-vampire. It was an idea that came from a book she loved, Skulduggery Pleasant . This is a picture of her. I’m using it because it’s the closest think I’ve got to a zombie picture, and I wanted a zombie picture because I placed two more of my zombie poems from the poem-a-day challenge from November. Yay!

“Attachment” and “Last Thoughts” will appear in a future issue of Star*Line. Yay!

The biggest problem I’m finding with some of these individual poems is that while they stand alone alright for the most part, some of them lose a great deal of their horror if they are read outside of the ‘zombie apocalypse’ context. That is easy to maintain when you’ve got a whole collection, but less so when it’s just one piece. That wasn’t a problem for “Attachment” or “Last Thoughts” though, so yay!

I don’t do New Year’s Resolutions. There’s no clever reason for it, I just don’t. Perhaps it’s just to be contrary. In fact, when we quit smoking several years back my husband and I made a point of doing it on December 30th rather than waiting a day or two because we didn’t want people to mistakenly think it was a New Year’s thing. Yeup. We really are that ornery

Still, this year is looking like it might be better than its predecessor. I feel like I’m beginning to crawl out of the grip of the depression I’d been fighting with over recent months. That’s a good thing for so many reasons, the least of which is not that it means writing is easier for me, it’s less of a struggle to focus and things might actually get done. Might.

Also, I have some upcoming publications I’m excited about. Shades of Green is obviously near the top of that list, but there’s also the six word memoir book from Harper’s Perrenial and a lot of poetry. I love the work I did for the November poem-a-month challenge and while I’m still working on placing most of it, I’m ridiculously excited to share it with you all. Soon, I hope. Soon.

What about you? What are you excited about for this coming year?

Last year when I started writing See the Sky Again there were still a lot of blank spots in my mind. I knew the setting, one of the characters and the ending. That was pretty much it. When I stopped writing it as a NaNo novel it was because I thought I should fan away a bit more of the fog and solidify some plot points in my brain before I worked on the project in earnest. Then I got distracted with other projects and See the Sky Again got put on the back burner for a while.

Well, when I dusted it off to work on again I had a good idea of where it was going and how it was going to get there. Or, if not good, at least I had an idea, which was more than last year. Unfortunately, as I was writing on it for NaNo I just wasn’t feeling it. I love the story, and I’m excited to tell it, but I don’t think it’s destined to be written in this way. Which is too bad because I’d like to get the first draft done sometime soon LOL

However, like I said above, I’ve pushed it to the side again for a while (shorter term than last time I hope LOL). Now I’m working on the re-write of Shadows as my NaNoWriMo project.

<.<

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What?

I couldn’t help it. Shadows won’t leave me alone. It’s always on the edges of my brain, demanding my attention. After the critiques I got from Jim C. Hines and Deena Fisher I had some really great ideas on how to improve it – trying to make it wait its turn until after I got the first draft of See the Sky Again done was, apparently, a very bad idea. I couldn’t focus on StSA because I really wanted to be re-writing Shadows.

Now that’s what I’m working on for NaNo (Note to any rules lawyers out there: I know that’s technically against the rules and um…I don’t care) and it’s going well. I’m enthusiastic about writing again and I really feel like the story is being filled out more this time. (One of my goals was to add more description and fill out the middle which I felt was lacking.) Yay! I’m hoping to complete the ‘new first draft’ via NaNoWriMo and then, just to be novel, NOT workshop it to death.

My nano word count is 6,652 so far, and I haven’t written yet today. Soon, I hope.

I’m also still working on the Poem-A-Day challenge and still loving it. Wheee! I’ve got 4 zombie poems (that I Love) and 2 more mainstream ones. I haven’t even looked at today’s prompt yet, but I’m looking forward to it. I’ll be sure and share at least one of the zombie pieces in my newsletter this month.

So far, November is being good to me. I hope you can say the same thing

In addition to doing NaNoWriMo this year, however, I’m also doing the PAD Chapbook Challenge. Times two, actually. My friend Beth Cato told me about it and I said I’d do it if she did. She accepted my challenge, so on top of the 50,000 words we need to write this month, we’ll also be writing 30 poems.

Actually, I’ll be writing up to 60 of them because I’ve decided to do the Chapbook Challenge times two. The first collection of poems will be mainstream and the second will be horror — zombies, to be specific. If a prompt doesn’t lend itself well to one of those genres I may only write one poem that day, but I’d really like to see two a day. We’ll see, I gues.

I hope to share some results in my newsletter, if there turns out to be anything worth reading just yet LOL There isn’t going to be much time for revision until December.

I’m pretty happy with the PAD challenge so far, in case you hadn’t guessed, and my word count for NaNo is still on track, so I’m counting day one as a victory.

I took the camera with me the other day, and managed to get a picture of this blue jay. I got a few other great pictures, including one of a squirrel who really didn’t want me near his tree and a magpie that was sitting at the very top of a giant pine tree, looking quite majestic.

This story, by the way, has nothing to do with the news I wanted to share today, but I wanted an excuse to post the picture, so there you go

So right, news. I’ve got some

Firstly, my poem, Fae, is in this month’s issue of Lorelei Signal. I love the illustration that Holly Eddy did for it. It’s very nice

Also, there has been a new review of Sister Margaret that I’m very excited about Anna, of Genre Reviews said:

Is it possible for a story to be simultaneously grim and fun? Because this one pretty much is. In the spirit of urban fantasy, there’s equal parts intrigue and action, the battle against an evil vampire, and a plethora of folks living in a gritty reality. I loved Bayne, who isn’t really a sidekick but fills the quirky content nicely, and the plot twist at the end is a great one, unexpected but logical.

She said more too, of course You can see the whole review here –> Sister Margaret by Rhonda Parrish

My last bit of news for today is that I’m going on vacation to San Francisco. Yay! We are leaving on Sunday and will be gone for a week. While I’m away I will be completely offline, I’m not even taking my laptop in order to force myself to not work, at least for a little while. I will see you when I get back though

I’ll leave you with a picture of Danica finishing up her ice cap from the aforementioned trip to Tims. Why? Because I think she’s awesome.

I put a ridiculous amount of pressure on myself to come up with something -good-. Something scary but with depth, haunting and evocative. You know what I found out? You can’t force that and it wasn’t going to happen LOL So I went with cheesy. I love cheesy horror, and apparently LB doesn’t mind it either because everything I submitted got in

The first piece of mine is called “Zonnet” and is, as the name sort of implies, a zombie-themed sonnet. I don’t actually like sonnets because I dislike iambic pentameter (the extra foot makes it awkward, I prefer iambic tetrameter, but we’ll get to that later). Still, I do enjoy taking a traditional/pretentious format like the sonnet and writing it about something as irreverent as zombies. This specific poem was directly influenced by S.G. Browne’s zom-rom-com Breathers.

My second poem is “Lycanthroku” which is a series of three shapeshifter-themed haiku, followed by “Lycanthrick” which is a werewolf limrick Jo and I composed while I was using him to bounce poem ideas off. I’m a fan of “Lycanthrick” all by itself, but it’s got an extra special spot in my heart because it’s the first time Jo and I have shared a byline. Awww /gush

I rounded out my submission with “The Sepultress” which is a reprinted poem I wrote in iambic tetrameter, because I like it far more than pentameter. Just sayin’

The book, Scattered Verses, Moonlit Curses, also features the work of Alexis Child, Charlotte Gledson, Natalie Sin, Julie “Cannibal Rose” Thielen, LB Goddard, Shells Walter, Richard Fay, Benjamin Bussey and Brian Beemer. I’ve not read it all yet, but I have looked through enough to suspect that cheesy horror wasn’t the style of choice for most people, happily, I don’t mind being different. I hope to read it sooner rather than later and share my impressions, but I haven’t had a chance yet. In my defense, the book just came out yesterday LOL