So I finally got around to submitting again. Now I am sure you were all hoping for some bondage talk but I am talking novels for publication. In its own way it is a power game. I do not have the money or resources to publish and market my books and the publisher lacks whatever creativity they need to produce marketable books on their own. But the power relation always feels one way. I have to submit my work to them and they get to do whatever they like with it, most likely reject it. It’s a harsh game that I know too well. My collection of rejection letters is almost enough to paper a room. I figure another couple of years and I will have new wave wall paper. Not that anybody else hasn’t thought of wallpapering their home with rejection letters.

I like to think of the publishing business as dating or maybe e-dating. Only I already know they are rich and powerful and they have dozens, maybe thousands, of others trying to get their attention. Think of it as sending an email to the hot profile, an email you poured yourself into- that is assuming you care enough about your love life and you are not spamming thousands of profiles in the hopes one will respond to your form letter. Form spamming aside, you put yourself out there, hope for a response, waiting days, maybe weeks and sometimes forever for a response. When you do get a response it’s typically some pleasant form rejection and you know your heart and soul has just been examined and hoofed to the side of the road in favour of someone better.

It’s not an easy thing to keep putting yourself out there in dating or publishing. I have never been able to develop the thick skin everyone tells me I need. So instead I polish my work to a mirror shine, perhaps over polish, and end up only sending in a few pieces when I am not totally neurotic about how bad they will seem. You end up not submitting as much as you want to. You end up not writing as much as you want to, well I mean writing it down on paper or as bits on a computer. I don’t know about other writers but I am always writing in my head. It’s kind of frustrating because it interferes with the rest of my life too. But my brain likes to spin and I have a hard time, well impossible time, stopping it. No amount of CBT, AT or whatever other abbreviations I have tried have slowed it yet, although NVC is nice when you can put your mind to it. But that is getting off topic. Submitting – it’s a fun thing to do in the bedroom with someone you trust, or people you trust if you are into that (happy now bondage crowd ^.^), but not as much fun submitting to strangers.