Thursday, July 21, 2011

The Joys of Acceptance

Just as a rejection might send you into fits of depression, anger, or despair, the arrival of an acceptance notification generates a degree of bliss not to be matched.  You might smile, dance a jig, hoot and holler, mention it (aka "bragging") to a friend, or fire off one or more social blasts to let the world know that; YES, YES, YES; you are a writer and an editor actually likes your work. Soon the entire world will see what you have produced.  Your joy is unbounded.

But publication is never immediate so there comes the impatient wait for publication, an agonizing delay of weeks or months - even years for novelists - as the manuscript is turned into whatever mode the publication needs.  The days drag by, you nervously fret that they've somehow screwed things up, the editor's had second thoughts, or that the publication will fold, dooming your story to the trash can.  Even the galley review hasn't curbed your impatience.  When is the damn thing going to appear, you ask?

Then the fateful day arrives. Once again you flood your social medium with links and beg your friends to glance at it.  If it is a print publication your cherish your precious author's copies, place them on your brag shelf, or maybe even read your words once more, savoring each exquisitely turn of phrase.  You might go to the local bookstand and hang out by the display, waiting for someone to pick up the magazine and wondering if you will be brazen enough to say "Hey, I've got a story in there.  Want me to autograph it?"  This thought fades after a few unproductive hours of waiting and getting suspicious glances from the security guard and a few young mothers who worry about you are standing so close to the teen magazines.

Finally, as all writers must, you return to your wordsmithing anvil to forge yet another tale, a few more pages of the novel, or improve a passage in something you have in seemingly perpetual draft.  The acceptance lies now in your past; an acknowledgement that you had accomplished something wonderful or, if you are more modest, acceptable.

You now know that you are a writer.

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