Keeping the Pipeline Full
Have you ever used an old hand pump on a well? You’ve got to pump a long time to get water out of one of those. Usually at the first trickle of water, if you stop pumping the handle, the water goes back down the pipeline and into the well. Then you’ve got to start all over again. But if you keep pumping, the pump becomes primed. Soon, water is gushing from the spigot and does not stop, even if you stop pumping the pump handle.
Writing is a little like that.
At almost every ‘writing don’ts’ session that I have ever been to, one or more editors will have a story of a person who argued with a rejection. For most editors, this is enough to earn a writer a scarlet U for unprofessional. And since editors talk, if one of them tells the story then another will hear of it. And that scarlet U may follow that writer around for a while.
From the other end of things, the writer was probably not writing often enough. Because a writer who is worried about one single rejection was probably too invested in that single submission. In other words, he stopped working the pump to look at the trickle of water coming out of the spigot.
I don’t feel that I currently have enough of my submissions out on the marketplace (about half of them are out, while the other half are waiting for me to find new markets to send them to). That being said, when I get a rejection, I’m usually in the middle of writing new story or cleaning up an edited story. Currently I’m working on a YA novel, an urban fantasy novel, an urban fantasy short, a zombie short for Yard Dog Press, a story for Lee Martindale’s anthology that I will submit in January, and something that will probably involve Mayan culture. And I still have all those homeless stories that I’m shopping around. In other words, my pipeline is full and the stories are flowing out of the spigot.
When I get a rejection, having that much work in my pipeline takes a lot of sting out of the whole rejection process. Not all of the sting, but enough that I’m not tempted to argue with an editor. After all, it’s just one rejection.