Tag Archive: rejection letters
Eric San Juan
March 11, 2009
Rejection letters. If you’re a writer, aspiring writer, wannabe writer, whatever writer, you’re going to deal with them. I don’t care how good you think you are, you will. That’s just reality. But here’s the thing: They need not be painful. Not even a little. Rejection letters are many things, chief among them something no writer likes to get, but they are more than a necessary evil. They are a sign that you’re an active writer. Proof that you’re actually writing, not just talking about writing. I mean, let’s face it, how many so-called “writers” do you know who never actually write? For every person who puts pens to paper or fingers to keyboard, there are a dozen of these talkers, people who like the…
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Eric San Juan
March 5, 2009
I spotted this post over at A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing and couldn’t walk away without passing it on, because it’s about as essential as essential gets. Confident or Delusional? ‘Tis a brilliant (and entirely true) entry. Some highlights: Confident writers expect to be periodically rejected. Delusional writers are shocked every time someone fails to recognize their brilliance. Confident writers take suggestion. Delusional writers believe their words are written in stone. Confident writers work even when it’s hard. Delusional writers believe they need to be inspired first. If you write or have any inkling of writing, you need to read this. Read it and ABSORB it. A lot of those lessons are hard learned. You need to set aside the naive arrogance of youth or,…
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Eric San Juan
February 18, 2009
Yesterday I talked about the process by which Jim and I began writing A Year of Hitchcock: 52 Weeks with the Master of Suspense. Week in and week out we were either in front of the TV watching Hitchcock’s work or, more often than not, in front of our keyboards writing, revising, and writing some more. It was midway through the year when we knew we had something publishable on our hands. By this time we has also developed an inertia that wasn’t going to break down, so we pulled the series offline and continued working on the same schedule we had set for ourselves at the start of the year. Now here’s where we broke ranks with how many nonfiction books are traditionally pitched…
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