Friday, January 1, 2016

New Vocabulary 2016

Happy 2016!

This is going to be a great year for all of us seeking representation and publication. You're wondering why? Because you and I are going to keep pressing forward, clogging up the inboxes of agents and working on our next great masterpiece! That's our goal this year--to just keep going.

I've got a little mind shift for you, though. I've always disliked the term rejection. To me, it really doesn't encompass what an agent or editor is doing after looking at our work. It's just too strong, even if it is somewhat accurate.

Consider Webster's 1828 English Dictionary definition:


REJEC'TIONnoun [Latin rejectio.] The act of throwing away; the act of casting off or forsaking; refusal to accept or grant.

Now, there might be a few agents who ask for that paper copy of our work, and they do literally throw it away. (Most likely nowadays they recycle it.) And we do feel cast off and forsaken when those form emails hit our inboxes. And it does boil down to their refusal to grant us representation, but that is not the whole truth.

The publishing business is so subjective that I can't spend my time thinking X number of agents have rejected me and my work. Instead, I use the word pass.

P'ASSverb intransitive. To be done.

You can't imagine how many definitions there are for pass! But this one is the simplest. Basically, an agent is done with my work...for the present time. This word instills hope, without the personal dismissal or cold shoulder or kick in the teeth that the word rejection brings to my mind. A pass still leaves the door open with hope that they'll consider another work in the future and they don't hate me.

Yet, I do know there are those who send our true rejection letters, cutting us down until we're ready to trash all our hard work. Those emails deserve to be called rejections, but I choose to delete or stick them in a recycle bin, depending on their mode of communication.

So I just want to encourage you to think in the positive for 2016 and that the writing world's "rejection" letters aren't as bad as they sound. Actually, the ones I've received that haven't been forms, are quite nice. I call those ones passes. :)