I got a positive rejection from The Missouri Review for a short story this morning. It was one of those rejections where you can tell that they’re genuinely sorry to not be publishing it. They invited me to send more in the future. Most of the rejections I’ve been getting for that story, lately, have been the, “What is wrong with you? Someone should take away your keyboard,” variety (not really, but that’s what it feels like).

I’ve gotten a few positive rejections for an a short memoir piece I’ve sent around, too. I sent that piece to six places and got five rejections. The last holdout is The Sun Magazine. I’m not expecting to hear back from them. So, I’m thinking about sending it to the California Writer’s Club short memoir contest. The deadline is the end of the month. I still can’t help thinking that it’s a waste of $17. Does anyone pay any attention to the California Writer’s Club? Maybe it would make more sense to keep sending it to journals? Journals are at least theoretically read by agents. Then again, what good would an agent do me, anyway?

After I got the positive rejection, I started thinking about how things might actually work in the future, and it caused me anxiety. Why do I have such fear and anxiety over things that are positive? Am I afraid of being exposed? Or, is it that I’m just afraid that it won’t mean anything? I think that’s one of my biggest fears—I’ll publish my story and it won’t mean anything.

I’m afraid I’ll publish my book and it won’t mean anything. I guess that’s why it’s so important to concentrate on being a good writer and nothing else. Writing is about serving… what? The writing itself? Maybe it’s about serving the art-gods or the muses or whatever forces out there want us to create.

It’s like being a dancer or a martial artist. Everything is just practice. It’s toning your muscles. It’s working on your flexibility. It’s getting finer and finer motor control. That doesn’t mean that the practice isn’t beautiful and can’t be appreciated by observers, but it is still just practice. It’s striving to achieve a thing that’s actually not achievable in human form, but gosh, we can sure look pretty trying to get there.

I’m planning on working on my book more later today. I’m in a little book review group, and we’re swapping manuscripts, so I need to get to that.