Paul Haines On Rejection

Australian horror writer Paul Haines is battling cancer, and based on his blog, he's doing it as bravely and with as much dignity as anyone can muster. Send some good thoughts and wishes his way, and if you wish, you can also help via this fund-raiser.

I found this article over at the Australian Horror Writers Association website. Paul talks about rejection, and gives advice on how to deal with it. An excerpt:

I came out of Clarion South with fantastic critiques of the work I produced there. Great stories. Minor tweaking tweaked. Sure-fire sell. I haven’t sold any of them yet. They’ve been rejected over and over and over from the big slicks in the USA. After a while you get to recognise the ranks of sub-editors and editors and how far up that rank your story has gone before it’s rejected. (I’ve managed to acquire Gordan Van Gelder’s autograph on most of the Clarion stories I submitted to F & SF -- I’m informed that’s a great achievement as you don’t normally get past Joseph Adams).

And after a few solid months of rejection I still get depressed about it and question the worth of my writing. Should I give up? Am I crap? Will I never make it? Last year was the worst year for my writing, or so I thought. I was burned out, all my new stories were rejected. I didn’t want to write. I thought there was no place for my work. "The Last Days Of Kali Yuga" was rejected from the Australian market I sent it to. I believed in this story. It went on to win the Aurealis Award for Best Horror Short Story and has been nominated for the Ditmar. (NFG, the magazine who published it, have nominated that story for several other awards, all of them overseas). And yet "Kali Yuga" hasn’t made the Australian Year’s Best - -another rejection. It still hurts, and so far that’s been my most successful piece.

The best advice for dealing with rejections: on the day you receive the rejection, send the story out again.

The most rejections I’ve had for any one story is seventeen. I believed in this story as well. And finally, so did someone else. It’s being published very soon, and if you read it, I hope you’ll believe in it too.