End of April Newsletter: Things They Don't Warn You About
Also: 25% off on my new book, Accountable, when you order before midnight on 4/28 (scroll down for details)
Dear Friends,
I spent yesterday having my picture taken, which is one of those Author Things that nobody warns you about. Specifically, they don’t warn you that people—both children and adults—will tell you when your author photo no longer looks like you, because time marches onward and photos don’t. Recently, an adult reader came to one of my events with a scarf she’d knitted for me — amazing!—and then commented, “You look so different from your author photo! But I guess the past five years have aged us all.” When I texted this to a friend, she said, “And now you can think of that remark every time you wear the scarf!” Which I do. It also motivated me to get a new author photo taken.
Rejection
Getting my picture taken (again and again and again) got me thinking about other things related to a writing career that people don’t tell you about, the biggest one of which is this: rejection will be a large part of your life forever. When my first book was published, in 2000, I thought, “Well, I’ve made it.” I imagined that from then on, I’d write things and people would publish them. I have no idea why I thought this; I come from a family of writers and had seen the many ups and downs of the writing life firsthand. But somehow the myth of the Successful Writer is so powerful that I ignored all the evidence from my own family and thought I had finally, at long last, put rejection behind me. Cue bitter laughter.
The truth is that the life of a writer is mostly failure and rejection. First drafts are generally terrible (mine are anyway) and require living with the knowledge that you have failed to write what you set out to write. By the third or fifth or tenth draft, when you think a piece is good enough to show people (critique partners, editors, agents), those people will usually tell you that it’s still terrible in ways you hadn’t thought of. A few revisions later, when you’re pretty convinced that most of the terribleness has been edited away and maybe you’ve written what you wanted to write after all, you’ll send it out into the world where it will face rejection in wide varieties of ways: editors who “pass” on it, reviewers who don’t like it, influencers who ignore it, gatekeepers who don’t love it, readers who give it one-star reviews, and — worst of all!—the entire universe of people who say nothing about it at all and don’t know or care that it exists. Even if you have a fairly successful career (and I count myself in this fortunate category), you will hear No far more often than Yes.
Today, for example, I received two different kinds of rejections. Yesterday, I received two others. I expect more tomorrow. Most of those rejections are of the ouch-but-I’ll-survive category. Some are of the curl-up-in-a-fetal-position-and-declare-my-career-over variety, although in the end, those turn out to also be in the ouch-but-I’ll-survive category too — it just takes a little longer.
Right now, I’m getting a lot of rejections because I’ve started submitting short stories to literary magazines. This is a weird part of my personality as a writer — I get bored if I do the same thing for very long and so I’m always hopping genres. I think some part of me must like the discomfort of floundering around feeling like I have no idea what I’m doing.
Long ago, when I only wrote for adults, I received a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts to write a book of short stories, but apparently — I’m a little foggy on it so many years later — I gave up submitting the resulting stories to magazines because of all the rejections. Looking over those rejections now, I wonder why I crumbled so easily. Yes, the New Yorker rejected five of my stories, but the editor told me she “admired” two of them and was “impressed” by a third. In the world of rejection, that counts as a win. These days, so I’m just trying to rack up as many as possible: seven so far this month, which is too low a number if I’m going to get to a hundred this year, as many folks recommend. (I’ve also had some success this month, which I can’t yet share, but don’t worry — you’ll hear about it when I can.)
One thing I’ve learned about rejection is to celebrate the wins when they come, in whatever form they come in. So here are a few other wins of the month:
I did a bunch of bookstore events for Wild Blue:
I rode my bike to Sacramento to raise money for Oakland public schools:
I went to the Texas Library Association contest in Austin to be on a panel about book bans alongside Kelly Yang, Varian Johnson, Becky Calzada (co-founder of Texas Freadom) and teacher Liz Seelig. Having my book banned in school districts all over the country is most definitely not a win, but rallying people to fight book bans is. More about that in an upcoming newsletter. But let’s bow to all the courageous teachers, librarians, parents, students, and activists who are in the trenches fighting for the Freedom to Read.
I signed a lot of books at TLA too, including Advance Reader Copies of my new nonfiction narrative, Accountable (which you can order yourself, using the discount code PREORDER25 at Barnes & Noble, if you order before midnight today), and copies of Wild Blue.
I wrote some new stuff, including a new picture book, and went for a swim at Barton Springs, which I became obsessed with after reading Elizabeth McCracken’s substack.
Oh, and it finally got warm enough to swim in the Bay without a wetsuit.
Discount of the Month: 25% Off My New Nonfiction Narrative, Accountable, if you preorder TODAY.
Accountable, is out on August 22 but if you order it from Barnes & Noble using the code PREORDER25 before midnight TODAY, Friday, April 28, you can get 25% off the list price. Preorders are a big deal for authors as they help new books get a toehold in a crowded field. Thanks in advance to all who order!
Thanks for reading.
I bow to you,
Dashka