Dealing With Rejection By Self-Publishing
Recently I reached out to a flash fiction publication, paying them a small fee for their editors’ feedback on my draft. I wasn’t expecting publication—I was expecting justified rejection and a smidgen of pounding, anxiety-fueled cardiac activity to remind me that I wasn’t writing into a void. Someone out there would brutally engage with my work even if I had to pay them for the privilege.
After a few weeks, I got the anticipated rejection with flummoxing comments. Their decline to publish me didn’t smart as much as their flippant perusal of the 831 words I sent for their thoughtful review.
Yet, pausing in my self-righteousness, I wondered if their collective misreading of what I sent them was my fault. Am I just bad at accepting criticism?
This experience reminded me of a moment in graduate school. At my institution, the students received letters at the end of the year detailing how the department’s faculty viewed their performance. My letters were always considerate, and I actually looked forward to them. One year, though, with a new head of the department, I received comments that didn’t reflect how I viewed myself and my progress in the program.
The letter was collated by a professor who gave me a difficult time in their class. During their course, I was repeatedly reminded that my writing, in-class participation, and presentations were lacking. In a panic, I completed all extra credit assignments (which they instated to help struggling students—me—bolster their flagging participation) with little acknowledgment and no improvement to my grade. Effectively, by the end of the term, I was too scared and bewildered to speak, and my confidence in my writing was shattered.
Such abusive student-teacher dynamics recur as an unfortunate trope of old-school academic hierarchy and gatekeeping—a form of hazing and shaming that masquerades as an earnest interest in the student’s success and flourishing. Of course, it’s also a trope in literature and film: from the emerging artist-protagonists in the novels of James Joyce and Elif Batuman to the high-pressure, sadomasochistic High Art environments surrealistically depicted in Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan and Todd Field’s Tár. (In case you missed it, I wrote about Tár here).
Despite this isolated occurrence, my experience in graduate school was better than most. My advisors were wonderful people who supported me and my work, and I still keep in touch with them. If it were not for these advisors and a student cohort assuring me that I was being treated somewhat unfairly, I probably would have suffered my own cinematic breakdown in my dealings with this one person.
To be a scholar, writer, artist, professional, and human is to ceaselessly dabble in rejection. I’ve been thinking about this vulnerability a lot in my recent pivot to writing—creative writing and fine art review. In whatever field we pursue—even before we are green-lit to pursue it, undergoing job searches, applications, and interviews—we constantly face evaluation.
Sometimes the feedback we receive stings but helps us grow and improve. At other times, glib critique unjustly gaslights us, ejecting us into existential, cavernous self-doubt. But, how do we tell the difference between “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” and “what doesn’t kill you gave you its best shot?” Or, between helpful and harmful critique? I’m not going to attempt to answer these questions here. Instead, I’m posing them while also conjecturing that our culture demands we deal with judgment and rejection without also teaching us how to use it. Additionally, we are offered few resources for how to ethically and beneficially assess others, either professionally or personally.
As someone who reviews the artworks of others, dealing with a sometimes excruciating and inscrutable mix of cultural production and ego, I’ve been contemplating how to justly present an artist’s blood-sweat-and-tears to other viewers to prompt deeper analytical contemplation and appreciation. Considering the tension between the creator’s intent and the viewer’s experience, I inevitably—and unintentionally—make people feel bad when I highlight the tensions between these two perspectives.
Artists want to be seen just as much (if not more) than everyone else, and it is universally devastating to have your work misread or to discover that your objectives do not translate. To that end, I try to honestly engage with people’s artistic productions, following the golden principle of offering the kind of feedback I myself would most appreciate. Yet, you can’t make everyone happy—especially people who seek nothing more than undaunting praise.
As a writer, as opposed to a visual artist, I also think about the different opportunities I have to exhibit my work to any audience at all. A piece of writing, requiring the “arduous” act of reading, takes more perceived effort than an art piece, requiring the “passive” act of looking. The issue is debatable, but, in my opinion, they take the same amount of critical ability and labor.
Moreover, an essay or story is not something you can slap onto the exposed brick wall of a cafe, asking $500 or the best offer for it. I guess Substack is supposed to be this figurative gallery wall, but for a no-name author like me who bulks at amassing a hefty social media following through perpetual networking and self-promotion, getting readers, let alone paying subscribers, overwhelms and disheartens me.
(These observations present another tangent that I’ll only briefly introduce: the idea of whose art or writing is deemed worthy enough by who for mass consumption.)
Even if my writing is indeed curated for paid publication, anyone’s sincere appreciation of it remains mysterious to me. For example, if you “like” my social media post announcing my latest publication, your support doesn’t guarantee your thorough engagement. And so, we circle back to my feelings of toiling for the void and the void alone, and my baseline desire for comprehensive rejection.
With the conclusion of this long preamble, I’m going to share the flash fiction I submitted with the hope that it reaches a wider, more interested audience (even just one pensive reader). Alongside the initial draft, I’m sharing the conversation that ensued with the editors and the piece I revised based on this experience.
Chim Chim Cher-ee
So that’s what it feels like to time travel, she thought, struggling to open the door that didn’t stick before. A wet hiss filled the dark-tarred street with colorless liquid. “It’s just your coolant,” a nearby voice assured. Was there a shriek of crashing steel? Or was it a gentle crumple like recycling a can? She looked around for the witness and found no one. Inside her ears, a faint, piercing tinnitus without memory. The airbag, a paratrooper’s deflated canopy. Faulty, she observed, feeling her sternum before pulling at her collar to peer inside. No bruise. A dull, soothing alarm chim chimmed, falsely chiming its signal to the police, the fire department, the hospital. Someone will be here soon and tell you what to do. In shock, she believed her own fantasy. Sitting in someone’s yard, she pulled up large yellow clods. She lifted the hollow tube of a dandelion stem to her nose, snuffing its bitterness, cold and damp on the rim of her nostril. Frozen in this tableau, the police appeared and told her to call her insurance company.
“How did you find out about me, Sharee?”
She didn’t correct him about her name, which was not even close to “Sharee.” Did he mean chéri, as in, “mon chéri?” A coldness filled her veins as she contemplated both possibilities.
“I can’t remember exactly. Some friend?” She remembered the exact person but withheld the information, regretting the referral.
“And the pain? It began after the accident?” he asked as he led her through a sunlit living room with greige carpeting, greige plastered walls, greige couch. Unblemished and gleaming, the upholstery chirped as she brushed against it. She shielded her eyes in the kitchen, adjusting to the glaring linoleum. Has someone died here? Why else would it be so disturbingly clean? Scanning the white grout between the tiles for imperceptible specks of the victim’s DNA, her gaze finally locked on his. Greg’s eyes glowed from the shining bald orb of his head, teeth flashing from a fleshy mouth. He’s the wolf, unwigged, and I’m Little Rear-ended–
“–nude.”
“Excuse me?” she gulped in his face, too close to hers.
“It’s easier if you take off all of your clothes.”
Absently nodding to his request, she sniffed loudly and puckered. Greg wilted self-consciously. “It’s Chinese medicine. We can discuss herbal remedies after your session.”
Shallowing her breath, she attempted to categorize the odor–not quite sweet, not quite earthy–an alien acridness. Face down, like a patient etherized on a startlingly white sheet, the aroma emanated from the polished glass jars, the dusted blinds, the sanitized massage table. She blinked through the portal of the headrest. A rabbit hole too small to fit through, it stretched out her face, and the inversion drained her sinuses. Beads of snot pat, patted the ground. The door clicked open. The door rattled shut. Greg’s palm, as disturbingly smooth as she expected it, pressed into her.
“My low back is very sensitive,” she reminded him as he, like an elf in a secret factory, took a small mallet and tap, tapped at the slender nails he placed at her sacrum. Greg grunted as she tensed, hammering harder.
“Relax, relax.”
A knot grew and spread, covering the base of her spine, irradiating out like stinging mycelium.
“Is this supposed to hurt?” she couldn’t feel the shape of her words.
It’s not. Relax. Not. Relax. Better. Help. Relax. His response, the needle sliding off the edge of a record like a ship on the periphery of flat Earth. Turn it over. Turn it over. Now. Please. Now. Turn. Turn it over. Tur-n. Tur-n. Tur-n. Fff-p. Fff-p. Fff-p.
So this is what the void is like, she didn’t think just then. Later she would close her eyes, and politely ask her consciousness to leave, waiting for that high to return and make her feel as vacant as she did the first time. You’re looking up at the dark dome of a planetarium, she would daily guide herself in meditation. You hear the whispered murmuring. Then silence as dots of light emerge. Speeds and comets of light, blue, pink, orange, white, white, white, breaking through to the other side of nothing. She would always remember and covet the void’s perfection.
How irritating to be called back now. Blank eternity. Sleep. Home. Stay. Stay home. This was peace. Peace. Rest in peace. Rest. Miss. Rest. Miss Rest. Miss–
“–West? Ms. West?”
Back into the blazing greige, the suck of her skin ripping off the vinyl headrest.
“Don’t! Don’t turn over! There’s still a needle–” Greg plucked an imaginary splinter. “Slowly, now. You were out for a while.”
Her whole body tingled with stupid, too-easily-relinquished life. How disappointing, being saved by this Bluebeard. Animosity filled her as she crouched on hands and knees, breasts hanging, sinuses still purging, her whole face flooded with despondency crusting into salt, hardening, tightening, itching–sensating with reminders of her animation, a writhing ball chained to this world.
From: —
To: Gina Pugliese
Subject: Your Submission
Dear Gina,
Thank you for your submission of “Chim Chim Cher-ee” to — . We gave your work careful consideration. Though we are not accepting it for publication, we hope you find a better fit for it elsewhere.
Because you have requested feedback, I’ve included comments from three of our senior editors below. Apologies for sending a few days later than promised—this is due to staff illness.
1. This is an interesting story but I found myself a little lost in this world. I would consider more transitions (from the accident to the medical office in particular was jarring). There was a familiarity between her and Greg but I wasn’t sure what their history was. I’d consider adding more details about the protagonist’s life so readers can better understand what she’s apparently trying to escape.
2. This is confident writing at sentence level and the scenes are vividly drawn. I’d love to get more of a sense of what it was in the protagonist’s life beyond this incident that was driving her response to the experiences of the story.
3. An interesting alternative world is built here. I got a little lost in the transitions and think the whole story could be slowed down a bit. I’d also like to know the narrator’s relationship to Greg, as she seems to know him from prior visits or is it from the other world? It would also be great to know the narrator’s drive to time travel. Is she searching for something? Longing to understand something in both the present and future?
Thanks again for trusting us with your work, and thank you for reading SmokeLong Quarterly. Our story archive is available free to read online.
All the best,
. . .
From: Gina Pugliese
To: —
Subject: Your — Submission
Thank you for reviewing my story and providing feedback. Some of the comments, including slowing the story down and adding more details about the protagonist’s life, I will seriously consider in my revision. However, most of the feedback provided left me feeling like the editors did not carefully read the story at all. The comments regarding Greg and the protagonist’s previous relationship (when there clearly wasn’t one) and the idea that the “time travel” alluded to in the opening is more than a metaphor make me think that they quickly skimmed my piece. These criticisms do not even fit the story I sent. In truth, I feel ripped off, if not a bit scammed, and will probably decline to seek you out for further submission, feedback, and instruction.
Best,
Gina
From: —
To: Gina Pugliese
Subject: Your — Submission
Hi, Gina!
Thank you for this feedback. After having read the story a few times, I agree with the editors’ comments about the transition from the accident scene to what seems to be a massage therapist’s home. It is jarring, especially because the reader has to at first figure out who’s speaking. The way the massage therapist’s name is introduced, because the narrative is in close third person, makes his character feel more familiar to Cheri than he actually is, and I’m sure this is what caused the editors to seek a previous relationship despite the dialogue indicating, in my opinion, that this is her first visit to his home.
There is just enough language in the text about time travel that I too did indeed think this story had a “real” element of time travel. Readers do not come to a text with the author’s intention in mind. I know it’s irritating to hear it, but if four editors who read tens of thousands of stories each year all have the same opinion about something, it might be a good idea to at least consider it. Starting with the question “So that’s what it feels like to time travel” will lead readers to consider that this story just might be about time travel–because the reader trusts you. And then she goes on, through the third-person narrator, to be disappointed that the massage therapist is somehow pulling her back to “this world”.
I’m sorry that you didn’t receive the feedback you expected, and I’m happy to refund your money if you have a Paypal account I can send it to.
All the best,
. . .
From: Gina Pugliese
To: —
Subject: Your — Submission
Hi, —!
I really can’t stress enough how grateful I am that all of you took some time with my story. I’m not asking for a refund because I respect the time you’ve taken. I’m really not trying to be that person. I guess I just wanted to give you some counter-feedback, and I also don’t want to sound defensive about it. Perhaps, to clarify my complaint, it would be more helpful if the editors provided feedback about being confused or unclear about language, context, transitions, or whatever without making assumptions about the plot that sound like glib misreadings (to a writer who has read too much Derrida to believe that the author has any claim to how the story is interpreted).
Thanks,
Gina
Chim Chim Cher-ee
So that’s what it feels like to time travel, she thought, struggling to open the door that didn’t stick before. A wet hiss filled the dark-tarred street with colorless liquid. “It’s just your coolant,” a nearby voice assured. Was there a shriek of crashing steel? Or was it a gentle crumple like recycling a can? She looked around for the witness and found no one. Inside her ears, a faint, piercing tinnitus without memory. The airbag, a paratrooper’s deflated canopy. Faulty, she observed, feeling her sternum before pulling at her collar to peer inside. No bruise. A dull, soothing alarm chim chimmed, falsely chiming its signal to the police, the fire department, the hospital. Someone will be here soon and tell you what to do. In shock, she believed her own fantasy. Sitting in someone’s yard, she pulled up large yellow clods. She lifted the hollow tube of a dandelion stem to her nose, snuffing its bitterness, cold and damp on the rim of her nostril. Frozen in this tableau, the police appeared and told her to call her insurance company.
Days passed. Weeks. The pop and crunch of her bones ripped through her chiropractor’s office. Her boss raised sharply angled ombre eyebrows at her requests for time off.
“Have you thought about acupuncture? For the pain? I know someone. Someone good. He works out of his home,” her boss suggested.
She didn’t feel pain. She felt a disturbing numbness. The accident rattled loose a long-dormant existential dissatisfaction inside her, crouching somewhere in a dark corner of her psyche. Her mind was, for the first time, acutely aware of the corpse encasing it, taking offense to the monotonous, unfulfilling tasks asked of it by people like the boss. She said nothing as her boss’s bejeweled, pointed fingernails fished out a crumpled business card from her purse like a claw closing around a prize in a crane game: Greg Lee H.H.P., C.H.
***
“How did you find out about me, Sharee?”
The door sprang open before she fully depressed the doorbell. Startled, she didn’t correct Greg about her name, which was not “Sharee,” not even close. Did he mean cherie, as in, “ma cherie?” A coldness filled her veins as she contemplated both possibilities–being misnamed or endeared to by this complete stranger.
“I can’t remember exactly.” Immediately regretting the referral, she didn’t mention her boss. She didn’t want to know the intimate history between Greg and the boss.
“And the pain? It began after the accident?” he asked as he led her through a sunlit living room with greige carpeting, greige plastered walls, greige couch. Unblemished and gleaming, the upholstery chirped as she brushed against it. She shielded her eyes in the kitchen, adjusting to the glaring linoleum. Has someone died here? Why else would it be so disturbingly clean? Scanning the white grout between the tiles for imperceptible specks of the victim’s DNA, her gaze finally locked on his. Greg’s eyes glowed from the shining bald orb of his head, teeth flashing from a fleshy mouth. He’s the wolf, unwigged, and I’m Little Rear-ended–
“–nude.”
“Excuse me?” she gulped in his face, too close to hers.
“It’s easier if you take off all of your clothes.”
Absently nodding to his request, she sniffed loudly and puckered.
Greg wilted self-consciously. “It’s Chinese medicine. We can discuss herbal remedies after your session.”
Shallowing her breath, she attempted to categorize the odor–not quite sweet, not quite earthy–an alien acridness.
Face down, like a patient etherized on a startlingly white sheet, the aroma emanated from the polished glass jars, the dusted blinds, the sanitized massage table. She blinked through the portal of the headrest. A rabbit hole too small to fit through, it stretched out her face, and the inversion drained her sinuses. Beads of snot pat, patted the ground. The door clicked open. The door rattled shut. Greg’s palm, as disturbingly smooth as she expected, pressed into her.
“My low back is very sensitive,” she reminded him as he, like an elf in a secret factory, took a small mallet and tap, tapped at the slender nails he placed at her sacrum. Greg grunted as she tensed, hammering harder.
“Relax, relax.”
A knot grew and spread, covering the base of her spine, irradiating out like stinging mycelium.
“Is this supposed to hurt?” she couldn’t feel the shape of her words.
It’s not. Relax. Not. Relax. Better. Help. Relax. His response, the needle sliding off the edge of a record like a ship on the periphery of flat Earth. Turn it over. Turn it over. Now. Please. Now. Turn. Turn it over. Tur-n. Tur-n. Tur-n. Fff-p. Fff-p. Fff-p.
Then there was the dark dome of a planetarium. Whispered murmuring. Speeds of light, blue, pink, orange, white, white, white, breaking through to the other side of nothing.
Blank.
Eternity.
Was this a dreamless sleep or a dream-filled one? Just sleep. This is home. Stay. Stay home. This was peace. Peace. Rest in peace. Rest. Miss. Rest. Miss Rest. Miss–
“–West? Ms. West?”
Back into the blazing greige, the suck of her skin ripping off the vinyl headrest.
How irritating to be called back! Later she would close her eyes, and politely ask her consciousness to leave, waiting for that high to return and make her feel as vacant and perfect as she did the first time.
“Don’t! Don’t turn over! There’s still a needle–” Greg plucked an imaginary splinter. “Slowly, now. You were out for a while.”
Her whole body tingled with stupid, too-easily-relinquished life. How disappointing, being saved by this Bluebeard. Animosity filled her as she crouched on hands and knees, breasts hanging, sinuses still purging, her whole face flooded with despondency crusting into salt, hardening, tightening, itching–sensating with reminders of her animation and the too-bright, too-pungent world.
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