09/11/00 -- First Post-Clarion Rejection

Alas

So it came, the rejection I was waiting for.  First post-Clarion rejection letter.

Fuck.

Oh, I should mention that there'll probably be a lot of profanity in here so if you can't take the heat and all...

Where was I?  Oh, yeah... Fuck.

I was expecting it, right?  GVG is pretty fast with his responses.  And, with WorldCon and and three-day weekend in there, that the rejection is at 17 days instead of the typical 14 isn't all that weird.  In fact, I expected it so much that I told someone in email: Watch, it'll come today and I'll be depressed because it's exactly what I'm waiting for.  Yep, it happened.  I get to the post office on my way home and it's right on the fucking top of the stack of mail.  No guessing, no happening upon it as I shuffle through bills and catalogs and stupid ads.  Nope, right on top like a slap in the face, no waiting, no guessing, just right there.  Wham.

And it hurt like a sonofabitch.  I knew what it was before I opened it.  My little SASE, light, too light to have anything more than that half-sized sheet of paper in it.

Post-Clarion rejection #1.  And it was a Clarion story.  Probably the best story I've submitted so far.  The first Clarion story to get revised and go out the door.

And it's just another rejection.  Like the stack I've got in my filing cabinet.  I should count them.  I must be close to 100 if I haven't passed that magical number by already.

It shouldn't hurt anymore than any other rejection.  It really shouldn't.

But it does.

Fuck.

All joy in the new camera I bought this weekend (because I'd had a shitty week at work and needed to spend money to make myself feel better)? Gone.

Any desire to go to the gym tonight and work out?  Gone.

Faith in my writing?  In my talent?  In whatever it was that got me into, then through Clarion? Gone.

And I think that maybe the reason this rejection is killing me right now, is that I haven't written anything new, nothing worth keeping, nothing finished.  Freewriting, yeah, sure.  Anything I can do anything with?  Nope.  My attempts to write the novel?  Clunk.  Everything's going clunk right now.  Absofuckinglutely everything.  Clunk.  Clunkclunkclunkclunk.  Fucking giant hailstones of letters and words just beating the crap out of me, out of my attempts to do something, anything that's worthwhile.  Clunkclunkclunk.  Again and again.  Every fucking time I sit down to write fiction.  Clunk.  At the keyboard?  Clunk.  In a blank book?  Clunk.  On a ruled notebook from work?  Clunk.  Clunkity-fucking-clunk.

Even my writing for work is clunking.  It's clunky, it's technical, it's stupid, it still takes more fucking energy than it ever has before.  I don't want to do it.  I don't have the energy to do it.  I don't have any real motivation to do it.

And the stuff I want to do?  Clunks just as hard.

Clunk.

Fuck.

Like something's gone and I don't fucking know what it is.  Like I don't know why I'm writing or who I'm writing for and I'm trying to do it anyway because stopping is just as hard as going ... as trying to go.

And so I'm drowning my sorrow, my irrationality, my insanity, in a huge mug of oatmeal cookie and wishing a certain someone would tell me I'm not a waste of oxygen ... Not because, even at this moment when I think I'll likely be unconscious soon, I think I'm a waste of oxygen, but because I'm depressed and I want reassurance from someone.  That someone.

But wanting never solves anything, though.

Neither does alcohol.

Or crying.

Maybe I'll try sleep.