{"id":763,"date":"2008-03-27T22:43:23","date_gmt":"2008-03-27T22:43:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/?p=763"},"modified":"2008-03-27T22:43:23","modified_gmt":"2008-03-27T22:43:23","slug":"rejected","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/?p=763","title":{"rendered":"Rejected!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Received my first rejection slip for <em>Ron the Body<\/em> the other day.<br \/>\n(Some of you might have pieced together I&#8217;m still writing the third draft. How can I get rejected when it ain&#8217;t done? Simply because I fired off a pitch to an agent when I hid the quarter-mark; you only need the first few chapters and a synopsis. I figured, correctly, it would motivate me to get the rest of draft 3 written but fast.)<br \/>\nIt&#8217;s not the first rejection notice I&#8217;ve received &#8211; I&#8217;ve been shopping around <em>in move<\/em> and <em>Fell Legacy<\/em> for a while, with no success. But both of those books are tough sells &#8211; a publisher has every right to second guess whether they could bring them to market. They&#8217;re both pitched a bit askew from easy genre fit. (<em>in move<\/em> sits somewhere between contemporary, popular and young adult lit; <em>Fell Legacy<\/em> is a fantasy novel treated as horror movie\/character study.) Plus, they&#8217;re far from perfect works of fiction &#8211; I&#8217;m still finding a voice in <em>in move<\/em> and in <em>Fell Legacy<\/em> I never really mastered the prose style I tried. So rejections for those have been easy to understand. Heck, sometimes I&#8217;ve received actual responses rather than form rejections, which have been invariably positive in the process of saying no.<br \/>\nIt is, however, the first time I&#8217;ve tried to get interest for <em>Ron the Body<\/em>, and I&#8217;d be lying if I said I didn&#8217;t care about getting a no. The reasons for my sanguine response to previous rejections don&#8217;t really apply here. Ron fits clearly into the subgenre of contemporary lit that uses a fantastical element to explore its ideas (c.f. <a href=http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/The_Time_Traveler's_Wife>The Time-Traveller&#8217;s Wife<\/a> and <a href=http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/The_Fortress_of_Solitude_(novel)>The Fortress of Solitude<\/a>). And my craft has improved out of sight. Ron is good to go. More than anything else I&#8217;ve produced, it could hold its own on a bookstore&#8217;s shelves.<br \/>\nBut you know what? I&#8217;m actually surprisingly cool with getting bounced back. (If I wasn&#8217;t, I wouldn&#8217;t be blogging this, for one thing.) The old thing about needing to rack up a whole bunch of rejections seems to have been taken to heart somewhere along the line. I don&#8217;t bear any ire towards the agency that said no, and I don&#8217;t feel discouraged about the potential of the book. There&#8217;s any number of reasons they could have said no, including that they thought it was terrible, and I&#8217;m cool with all of them. It&#8217;s all part of the game, right?<br \/>\nSo, then. This post marks the beginning of the rest. Onwards.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Received my first rejection slip for Ron the Body the other day. (Some of you might have pieced together I&#8217;m still writing the third draft. How can I get rejected when it ain&#8217;t done? Simply because I fired off a pitch to an agent when I hid the quarter-mark; you only need the first few &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/?p=763\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Rejected!<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-763","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-self-ish"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s8D9ZE-rejected","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/763","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=763"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/763\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=763"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=763"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=763"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}