Author’s Note and TW/CW: Hi all! This post is a bit dark and sad and deals heavily with rejection and my processing of rejection which is probably not healthy and is done from a neurodiverse lens (e.g. it’s got rejection sensitive dysphoria allllll over it). There’s an undertone of depression/melancholy and isolation. Please read this only if you’re in the right headspace for such a post. And, if you’re having trouble, please also feel free to reach out. I’ve been extremely disconnected lately (more on that in the blog), but part of the reason I’m writing this is to extend a hand to anyone who might be feeling anything similar. You’re not alone.

Mostly, though, this post is to fulfill a promise. When I became agented, I said I would continue to tell the truth, even if ugly. So, here we go.

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In the summer, I dreamt.

I was an old man. Anime-esque in my ancient body—frail—with knock knees, a curved spine, and a long, white beard. My only clothes a dirty loin cloth, ragged wool cloak, and worn shoes.

A gnarled wooden walking stick sometimes in my hand, sometimes not. It came with a vague sense of trekking up a mountain in the Himalayas. I remembered ice scraping my face, battering my paper thin, pockmarked white skin. Caves. Lean fires I barely kept burning. Meals of “soup” made of nothing but melted snow. Nights awake, shaking, stomach growling, thinking I should turn back. But the start was now further than the finish. Forward was the only option.

Yet these nights were not where the dream started. It started where dreams so often do: in media res. Somewhere a decision would be made. Beaten, bruised, dehydrated, desperate, it would come down to these next few moments. In my chest, a heavy, resolute heart thumped.

In front of me, nearly buried in the side of the mountain, sat a stone cabin. White smoke wafted from the chimney in whisps as ghostly as the tufts of hair hanging from the sides of my otherwise bald head.

I took another step. My foot sank into a small drift of snow. My malnourished body teetered. I gnashed my teeth, the skin on my nose wrinkling. My heart thumped again. Twice for good measure. Another step. Another. Another. Each one harder than the last but closer, too.

The toe of my threadbare shoe hit something colder and firmer than the snow. Had there been air in my lungs or circulation in my feet to feel the stub, I might have cried out. As it was, I simply toppled forward, knees slamming against the cabin’s stone doorway. My fingers stretched out, thin and gnarled like sticks. The nubs of my chewed off fingernails scraped the base of the cabin’s wooden door.

My chest hit the stone next, but my fingers continued to seek the warmer, softer wood. Yet before long, even that effort became too much, and my hand flopped to the side.

A noise escaped my throat. More whimper than cry, barely audible over the wind. A sound better suited to someone coming into the world than leaving it. Deep in my chest, I strained for breath, for strength to push out something louder, something that might be heard, but the effort only left me wheezing.

The door flew open. What I thought must be hell’s very own horses came stampeding forward, shocking me with their searing heat. I blinked back tears and pulled my arm into my chest. All the while, the rest of me shifted on the stone, inching closer to the warmth of the cabin’s fire like a sunflower seeking a far off sun after 100 years of night.

When my tears dried, I looked up to find a man looking down. My head felt like a thousand pound stone, but I forced myself to hold his gaze. He needed to see me. To help me. To look into my eyes and know I was here. To know I was real. That I had fought each step to end up on his very door. Surely he would see the battle scars, the tragedies, the toll it had taken. Surely, he would see I had conquered the pain. I hadn’t quit. Surely, that meant something. He would make sure my efforts amounted to something.

The man’s lip pulled back, nose wrinkling. He was round and healthy, cheeks flushed pink, black hair slicked with oil, dressed in deftly embroidered silks of the deepest shades of red, blue, yellow, purple. I had to tuck my chin into my chest to keep the colors from ricocheting off the snow, burning my eyes just as the warmth of his hearth had burned my fingers.

He saw me, and his brilliance burned me.

As ever, I had to look away.

I told my writing friends about the dream. Said it ended here, with my fate undecided.

It didn’t end there.

In the dream I really had, the man turned with a whoosh of his silk robes and a door slam that made my molars chatter. Even now, my skin prickles, haunted by the gust of warm air followed by the cold clattering of an iron door knocker and the even colder howl of another storm on the horizon.

Strange, how cold can burn.

I tried not to think of the dream as prophetic, which is why I didn’t tell my friends the ending, but for months, it’s been my shadow.

The day after the dream, my first book to ever go on submission was scheduled for acquisitions.

I knew from the beginning it went there to die.

There are some people for whom acquisitions does not matter. Barack Obama, Prince Harry, Leigh Bardugo, debuts with 582 likes in prestigious pitch competitions and 13 offers of representation before the day is out.

For most other authors—midlisters, debuts, those of us who are decidedly Not the Darlings—acquisitions is too often the place books go to gasp their last dying breath on the doorstep of Almost but Not Quite.

So it has been with me and the book I’ve been working on since May 2020. 42 months of work. 13 drafts. Four nearly total rewrites. Author Mentor Match. Rejection. Pitch Wars. Selection. Revision. Showcase. Hopes. Defeats. Tears. Restarting. Querying. Quitting. Restarting again.

Poof. Gone. Dead.

Part of me wants to default to some technical post about “What is Acquisitions” and “Why do I Care” (oh look! I did end up doing that!) but the other part of me wants to write what I know best: Failure. But I’m afraid, too. The stakes are higher than ever, not only for me now, but for my agent, who took a chance on the writer most well-known for talking openly about failure. I don’t have a ton of marketing experience (oh, hey, I failed at that, too), but I’m willing to bet building a sort of brand around personal failings isn’t exactly screaming, “Pick me for your next best seller!”

Yet the biggest of truths is actually this: I’m tired of failing. I’m ready for my time. My chance. My Big Deal Announcement. My good news. I’m ready to answer the question, “When is your book coming out?” with real information instead of, “Likely never, but hold on! It’s not because I’m a bad writer, and the book is great I promise. It’s because publishing is wild. Here are some colorful charts I made explaining uh… that.”

In short, I am absolutely unspecial in wanting what all of publishing wants: To be special. For once.

And damn if I didn’t think this time was finally going to be the time.

When my agent told me I was going to acquisitions, I was eating strawberry shortcake in Boston’s Quincy Market. My coworker and I were killing some time before our flight home to Philadelphia after a conference. They snapped this photo of me right after I got the news.

I hadn’t been that excited since getting into Pitch Wars. I had no idea what the hell acquisitions was, but it seemed like we were almost there. Finally. After such a long, winding road, my turn had come.

Within 15 minutes, my agent had explained what acquisitions was, and I had promptly smothered my joy. Looking back at that photo, I wish I hadn’t. It’s honestly one of my favorite photos of myself. I usually hate photos of me, but I don’t know that anyone had ever captured true joy on my face before this photo.

The thing is, I smother excitement and lower expectations to protect myself, hoping that will dull the pain. Across thousands of rejections of my work by professors, peers, workshops, literary magazines, journals, mentorship contests, beta readers, critque partners, agents, editors, booksellers, hell, even my own high school library, you’d think I’d be tougher by now. Poetry, songs, screenplays, short stories, creative non-fiction, young adult, new adult, adult, literary fiction, fantasy, romance. You name it, I’ve likely been rejected for it. Still, I cry.

The further along I get in this journey, the more I realize I’ll never acclimate to the pain. No matter what I do or how I try to protect myself. It’ll always be there. Sometimes more, sometimes less. Sometimes expected, sometimes a jolt like a splinter. Yet always present in some form or fashion. The only thing that changes is me allowing myself less and less joy to look back on to remind myself what made the pain worth it in the first place.

That’s why I love this photo. Because in it, joy persists.

It persists in other, subtler ways, too. For a few days after the acquisitions notification, I let myself try to find connections. Cake connections, to be exact. The backstory is when I signed with my agent, I ordered a specialty cake complete with glass slipper for my very own happily ever after. I froze some of it (like freezing the top of a wedding cake), promising myself that when (not if) the book sold I would eat it to celebrate.

Then, the acquisitions update comes and of all things to be doing at 10:00 a.m. in Boston, I’m eating cake. My coworker who was with me has a friend who owns a cheesecake shop in Baltimore. Baltimore where my Pitch Wars mentor lives. The date for acquisitions was my boyfriend’s birthday. I’d be eating strawberry shortcake. I convinced myself it was all connected: by cake!

But before my cake and its hope could do too much damage with those pesky roots, I braced my fingers around the base and yanked. No more hope. Not for the girl who built a brand on failure. The truth, my truth, is to be Not the Darling. Not the exception.

Self-fulfilling prophecy, perhaps. Or perhaps I know the brutal routes of my own life and luck.

The book didn’t make it through acquisitions. Not when it went that first time in the summer. Not when it got very close again with someone different in the fall. Not when it was “there but for one more approval” with a third press in the winter.

The first time, I gave such a play by play of acquisitions and my detailed divination over cake that my coworker sent me cheesecake to “celebrate.” I took photos of it with my favorite bookmark and cried when it all fell apart. The second time, I only told a few people. Only one person asked how it went. By the third time, I didn’t even update my partner. It’s hard to be the one failing all the time, but I think it might be harder to be the one powerless to help the person you love.

Another hard truth: I’m tired of putting this burden on my friends, my family, my agent, my partner. There’s nowhere for the grief to go, yet it never seems to stop coming.

Sometime between summer and fall, I disappeared from my writing groups. It was a me problem. I no longer knew what to say that wasn’t sad or somehow wrong, but I could no longer bear the weight of pretending I was okay. I wasn’t jealous of my friends’ success. I was, am, and will always be incredibly proud of them. I have all their books on preorder and yell about them frequently to anyone who will listen, sending links to coworkers with declarations of “I KNOW HER/THEM!”

What I was (and continue to be) is ashamed of myself. For failing. Again. I know it isn’t logical but there it still is.

Sometime in the fall, I stopped talking to all but one IRL friend. I buried myself in work. My 12 hour days became 16, 17, 18 hours. Anything to keep me from having to think about books, or submission, or if I was the only person in history to have come so close so many times only to have the door slammed in her face.

Dead on submission.

Dead. There’s no primer for how appropriate that word is. The death of hope. Of joy. Of what little self-confidence you managed to cobble together in this Alice in Wonderland industry. The death of five million words spilled over the course of 30 years as I struggled to get to this point. As I climbed every mountain ahead of me, feet bleeding, heart ripped out and raw, offered on a plate, freezing and frail. The sacrifices I made, the lives I could have lived. Only to arrive here at the gate, my destination in plain sight.

To die.

No cake for me.

No happily ever after.

Because spoiler alert: This book dies in the end.