Submissions on top of applications

I mean, would I be a writer if I didn’t post a picture of one of my typewriters with this entry?

Part 11 in this series.

As if ending up on the job market hasn’t generated enough rejection, the timing of my job search has me navigating another period of being told no in my professional endeavors. Submission season.

The end of summer through early fall is when I typically send all of my unpublished creative work to journals and magazines for consideration. Most places I send submissions have a rejection rate north of 95 percent, which means…I already had a stack of nopes coming my way at the exact moment a flood of job rejections began arriving.

But it gets better! I also recently completed a draft of a novel manuscript I think is ready for serious consideration. So, in the middle of the summer, I sent it to several agents to see if I can find representation. This is also an endeavor that leads mostly to doors closing.

And, in the void space between jobs, I have also been cold calling potential clients for freelance work, something of an infrequent side project when I was employed full time that will now, hopefully, provide a bit of a life raft to float me. The kind of writing, editing, or coaching work I do could also provide me something other than not having a job to expend some of my mental energy on. In the short term, though, mostly it’s provided an extra dose of rejections, mostly of the silent variety.

In some ways, the fact that I’ve dealt with exponentially more rejections than acceptance in my publishing career should have inoculated me to what I am now experiencing.

I tell myself this a lot, anyway. I have the requisite writer’s gallows humor. I have a network of friends who also trudge through the submission wastelands in search of the one or two acceptances that will keep us going.

But if I’m honest, it kinda feels like piling on at this point. And, in many cases, I’m the one throwing things on the pile.  

I don’t really know what to do with this awareness other than acknowledge it even as I hope to someday look back and say this was the fire I had to walk through to get where I ended up.