Let me explain.
With a new manuscript, it's time again for me to start the process of submitting it places, and I made the supremely depressing decision to try and secure a literary agent this time around. If you know anything about this process, you know that it necessitates a lot of rejection... potentially more than submitting directly to publishers who don't require agents. So I was tiptoeing around starting the process, prolonging the inevitable Band-Aid pull, when I made a decision.
Instead of aiming for acceptance, what if I focused instead on rejection? What if I even set a goal?
It would ease the sting of so many rejections, and since I am a type A, neurotic perfectionist driven at breakneck speed toward any goal... it just might work.
So the goal of 50 rejections in 52 weeks was born. I started "shooting my shot" at any publisher, agent, journal, or organization that would have me. I've been shopping out plays, short stories, poems, my novel--everything. Because when you're aiming to fail, why not?
And boy have I been failing. I've submitted seven different places in the past month, and I've gotten two official rejections, four still up in the air, and one very precious yes.
Unexpectedly, the play I wrote for grad school, the play I thought was silly, inconsequential, and not worth the paper it's written on... is going on for a public reading.
...just as soon as we are all allowed out of our houses again.
I know it's early, and those two rejections still stung, but I've been doing things I never thought possible. I've been pitching agents way "out of my league", sending out work I don't love, and bettering myself along the way.
So I feel like I can tell you: aim to fail. Fail often and fail well and be proud of that failure.
Because that's the only way I know to succeed.
