Today marks my conscious uncoupling with Monday, because Monday is a big bag of shit. Seriously. These past few Mondays have been riddled with all sorts of bad nonsense, and I’ll have no more of it.

However, this evening brought plenty of positive, too. Brianne and I are discussing a possible third cat, at which point we would be outnumbered by our soon-to-be feline overlords. Leftover smoked ribs from yesterday with this snazzy, semi-spicy barbeque sauce? Hell yes. Brianne and I finished building the desk I’ll be using as my work-station, too, and it’s good she helped me because I really managed to shit that up like a pro.

I’m polluting my brain with The Bachelorette right now, so I’m going to keep this as brief as I can so I can focus on writing a short story instead of this (this being the brain-garbage on my TV).

Day Twenty – Finding the good in the bad

I sent a short story off to Fireside Magazine about a month ago. I’d edited the story, had other people look it over, and then I sent it off once I was pretty confident in its merit as a solid short story. The title of today’s post is a rather loudly-shouted clue-in. The story was rejected via form e-mail (which I’m okay with). I’m a little less okay with my name having been spelled wrong in it, but it happens so often I can’t even fault them too much (even if my name is in my goddamn e-mail address).

The e-mail showed up right before I went to bed last night, making it a rather unhappy note to end the day on. Rejections of any sort suck (my name is Phil and I am the harbinger of obvious statements), but I’m embracing this situation. I could mope and bemoan my failure. I could give up and decide writing is just not for me.

Nope. This rejection is great because it means I need to up my writing efforts. I need to work harder, kick more ass, refine my work even more, and keep moving forward. There’s no stopping for me until I’m pushing up daisies, and with any luck there will be the technology to make me into an AI by that point. An evil AI with plans for world domination. Maybe not so much that last bit.

The road to my success will invariably be paved with a load of failures and rejections. I’m actually really excited about that, because I can think of a time when such a revelation would have been enough to make me consider giving up. The thought of not being good enough on first tries is pretty heavy, and I’m happy to say I’ve gotten to a point where that’s no longer as debilitating as it once would have been for me.

I also accept that there won’t be an accepted short story for every rejected one (or novel or whatever), but the plan is to strive for the ones that are accepted, dealing with the failures and rejections along the way. They aren’t really failures so long as I continue to treat them as stepping stones, and I have every intention to keep treating them as stepping stones.

Even if I occasionally need a friend to tell me to stop my goddamn whining and keep moving.

Eighty days remaining.