Off to the Ball

By Cindy Beck

Rejection. It's probably one of the hardest aspects of being a writer. Well, writing revisions isn't really fun either, but at least you eventually feel like you're moving forward when doing rewrites. With rejections, you feel as if you're regressing.

At least, that's how it was for me a few years ago. After mailing out what seemed like a gazillion submissions, and getting a gazillion and one rejections in return—I know that's a mathematical impossibility, but tell that to my heart—it seemed to me there was absitively, posolutely, nothing to be gained from rejections.

Wrong!

Okay, so it wasn't the first time I was wrong. What I've learned is that those works weren't necessarily rejected because they were awful (be still my heart), but because they didn't fit what the editor needed at the time. I started "recycling" the rejects and guess what? Some of them just needed a dab of perfume here and a touch of blush there, and voila! They were ready to go out on the town again.

The nice thing was, I didn't have to spend hours, days, weeks, or months on them. And to my surprise, a few of them even turned out to be belles of the ball ... on their second time around.