A Writer's Notebook, Day Four-Hundred-And-Seventy

One of the more difficult aspects of writing, I find, is keeping optimistic through rejection.  My approach is largely to work at feeling fulfilled by doing the work, but it does not work entirely.  For one thing, there is a level at which work does not feel completed without an audience.  My intent is always to write for a reader, and the work is only half about what I have put on the page.  I consider the reader as a partner, the work as inert until it is read.  The building up of work that is unpublished, then, can be a bit frustrating.

As well, in the context of repeated rejection, that large amount of work can seem mocking.  All of this, I think at dark times, and what have I to show for it?  I have a great many rejections, and very few acceptances at the moment.  I hope that will change, but it is easy to feel dejected.

The only thing I can really control, in the end, though, is if I keep writing and sending out work.  I believe in my work, and I also believe that writing more is the best way to improve as a writer.  I don't have the ability to control the reception my work receives, but I can keep at it, can even see that, at times as it's own triumph.

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