THE JOYS AND FRUSTRATIONS OF WRITING

Receiving  your first acceptance is a special moment!  Especially if you’ve had rejections for a long time, it is wonderful to get some vindication.  Enjoy the feeling! This is closely followed by your first cheque if you win a prize with an acceptance! Do colour photocopy it and keep it somewhere.  It’s good to look back on and you’ll remember how good you felt when you received it.  It’s the nearest you can get to bottling that feeling for days when things aren’t going so well.


Getting the Mxlexia Writers’ Diary, enjoying reading the wonderful stuff in it, and then getting more work done so you actually have stuff to write in there!  Seeing a blank submissions page is a great incentive for producing more work so you can fill it in!  And the more work you’ve got out there, the likelihood of acceptance increases too.


Wishing you had more time to write so you can get even more stuff out there!  This feeling is encouraged by receiving your first acceptance!


People not having heard of wherever it is you are being published!  You’ve got to be able to explain quickly.  You don’t want the glazed eyes look in  your listener!


A story you feel should have done well being rejected and when you look at it again discover a stupid mistake.  In my case I misspelt my main character’s name twice.  Lesson learned:  pay more attention before sending anything out.  Having said that I’ve reworked this piece, added to it and sent it out to Bridge House for their Open anthology due out in 2010.  Definitely worth having a go there.


Trying to explain to family and friends you did write the story ages ago but it takes time to get it into print, on the web etc.