Welcome back!

Ask any writer what they think about rejections and you’ll get a myriad of responses, but they all share a common thread: “We don’t like them, but they’re a part of being a writer.” And wherever there are opinions about rejections there are numerous ways of dealing with them ranging from some more sensitive souls breaking down in tears to others reacting in more aggressive or creative ways.

I, on the other hand, like to view rejections as a goal.

While working with a mentor of mine in the Writing Popular Fiction program at Seton Hill, he told me that while you can’t make a goal out of how many acceptances you get in a year, you can make a goal of how many rejections you get. Ultimately, you can control how many submissions you sent out and therefore how many rejections you get since most agent and publisher rejection rates are usually at least 95%. By treating rejections like this, I make it into a game. It also motivates me to keep submitting in the face of rejection.

For this year, I made a goal of getting at least 10 rejections, so far I have 8. I’m hoping that the last two will come in before the end of the year, but it’s getting close to the holidays so I may not make it.

What is your rejection goal? Do you have another way you deal with rejections?

I can now say that the end is nigh. No, not the end of the world (at least I hope not) but the end of my novel. So far I’m in the last 5,000 words or so of it and I can feel the threads are coming to a close and then I can start the process of re-writing.

I do apologize for the lack of content update, but it’s been a harrowing week or so. Who could have thought possible to first catch something at Residency and then get either some minor food poisoning or stomach flu from a July 4th family gathering? It makes me the lucky winner this month and my prize is an economy sized bottle of Pepto.

Toward the end of this week, when I aim to finish the novel, I’ll be going back to my daily posting regime and post some more information on what happened at Residency and what I learned while there. I also have some great updates as far as social networking is concerned and how writers can use it to their maximum effectiveness.

Well, here we are the Sunday before Residency, and this is my first post concerning progress on my thesis novel. I hope to post occasionally on this to tie together the quick status posts I put on Twitter, Pownce and Facebook about my total progress.

Right now I’m almost at 80,000 words so I have about 10,000 or so words left in order to finish the novel. I believe though that I can wrap it up in about 5,000 words. I’ll be able to get at least another 1,000 tomorrow, and I plan to see if I can keep the momentum going during Residency, but that might be a little difficult considering I still have my critiques to do.

So far though, after speaking with my mentor, I’ve had an output spike and I hope to keep it going. I seem to have gone through so many different ways of keeping my output up. I’d like to hear some of different ways all of you use to keep on writing. I’ll post the top five methods you recommend in a later post.