Solidarity...or something like that...

I may or may not have reached a turning point in these past few weeks of publishing attempts. At this point I thought I'd received every different kind of rejection letter possible. There are the personal and encouraging ones. The constructive criticism ones, and then there are my favorite, the impersonal "I didn't even read your query" form letter ones.

On Thursday I received a rejection notice that fell into the latter category. Only this time it was different. This time instead of just being sent to me, it was also CC'd to....237 other authors. Bam. Pow. Smack. All of you, all 238 of you SUCK! All of you are rejected MUAH HA HA HA! 

Well, at least that's how I read it. I was on the phone with my mom and was just so astounded by the sheer magnitude of it. My first thought was, well, there's the reason I haven't had any success so far. There are just so many of us. And we all want it, bad! 

Then the emails started flowing. See, now we all had the addresses of 237 other brutally rejected, aspiring authors and everyone was hitting "reply all". Most were poking fun at the assistant who made such a stupid mistake as to hit "cc" instead of "bcc". A lot were simply stunned because that one little mistake proved what some of our deepest fears are. There's really no one out there reading these things. All our carefully thought out queries are just going to lowly assistants at literary agencies and subsequently getting rejected with out any thought or care. Granted, that's not always the case, but it certainly seemed like it in this situation.

But this proved to me that writers are nothing if not resilient. After the shock was over there came poems (hilarious) and then the idea that we should all band together from here on out for support and call ourselves "The 238". Facebook groups were formed and by Friday night we had all been contacted by a small magazine who wanted to run our story of mass rejection. 

So, there has been good out of the bad. I've realized that I'm not alone in this process, and though these fellow authors are my competition, they also are going through the same arduous and often depressing process I am. 

I'm not certain on any of the magazine details as of yet. Besides the name of the publication and when our story should be published, May/June. I've already sent in my own author profile and will be featured among the other 238 members who chose to send theirs in as well. In preparation for this tiny bit of publicity I've created my own author Facebook page, you can visit it here to learn more about what I'm up to lately! Oh and like me!

This could all be the turn of the tide, or it could be nothing. It remains to be seen! I'll be re-writing my synopsis as well this week and need some volunteers to do a little test reading for me!

Thanks, as always, for the support!