The Art of Receiving Rejections or How I’m Crashing Out

Aug 22

I’m in the Query Trenches.

It’s tough in here. I honestly thought I could handle it. As tough as I am, or as tough as I thought I was, receiving emails randomly and having your work rejected is not easy.

This week in particular, it all caught up to me. Let me set the scene.

We started our homeschool year this week. Back to school is always stressful. I also had to take on some more clients to make ends meet, and that’s been frankly stressful. It’s not that I don’t love the work. I do, but it’s more time I have to schedule.

This brings me to my writing, which has become stagnant in this moment. I’m too busy. I’m stretched too thin. When am I supposed to write? At midnight?

In the stress of wondering, “How do I make time for my dreams?” I receive a rejection and the spiral starts. I begin to think, “Maybe I’m not meant to do this? What if I shouldn’t have queried in the first place? Should I just pull it and self-publish?”

This is what my teenage daughters would call CRASHING OUT.

And I’ve been doing it a lot.

In the midst of all of this, a beta reader reached out and said she loved my book. Okay. I’m not a failure. Yet.

And this is when I needed to get real. Am I really a bad writer? No. Is querying easy? No. Was I expecting an offer right out of the gate? No.

So to combat the crashing out, I’ve been working on my mindset.

I’ve been waking up every day and stretching on my vibration plate. I’m looking at my writing every day, whether I have time to write or not.

And I’m reminding myself that this is a long game. I want to build a writing career. I really do. I want to be an author with books left and right. Every day, I do something that brings me closer to that goal.

This mindset shift has changed how I feel about the query trenches, and while crashing out is bound to happen, I’m offering myself grace.

So here’s to the trenches. They are lonely, they are hard, but I’m building some incredible resilience that will carry me through my author career.

Good luck out there!

Sidebar

HI! I’M CAROLINE!

I wrote a book and now I’m writing more. I’m a wife, homeschool mom, podcast editor and host of Bookish Ambitions. I am, in short, a lot of things. But right now, I'm most excited to be a romance novelist.