Just a quick note, to the writers out there who read this blog, about the pain of rejection, which is one of those things that all successful writers mention in passing, but of course, being successful writers, we all know, that this is just the beginning of the story. Hearing about how your favorite writer was rejected early on is fun.

It’s refreshing. It’s inspiring.

It suggests that a time may come when rejection hurts less. Or when there is much less of it.

Maybe that’s true. Maybe it will be true for me, not a successful writer but a writer who has now had enough success to think that true success might one day be possible. But it’s not true yet.

And a friend of mine related a bit from James Patrick Kelly,  a long-time favorite SF short fiction author of mine, about how the rejection never ends, it just changes its tune.

First, your story is rejected with a form.

It’s rejected with a nice note.

It’s rejected with a rewrite request. Then the rewrite is rejected.

The story is published! Nobody reviews it. Nobody seems to read it.

The story is published! It gets bad reviews.

The story is published! Some good reviews! A few people admit to having read it! Award time comes…. crickets.

Award time comes, a few recommendations. (I am here; the rest, from here on out, is hearsay and speculation, based on the second hand reports of the Jim Kelly bit.)

Award time comes, you made the ballot! Now you lose the award.

You’re on the ballot. You lose. Again. And again. And again. (It’s a honor to be nominated!  You get to to go to the Hugo Losers party!)

You’re on the ballot. You win. You still can’t sell your novel.

You sell your novel to a publisher! (repeat above, ending with, the book doesn’t earn out. Your publisher says no to the half finished sequel.)

You regularly sell novels. Which never make a bestseller list; you limp along, able to keep publishing, knowing you will never be Neil Gaiman or George Martin.

You become Neil Gaiman and George Martin.

You know you’ll never be J.R.R Tolkien.

It’s rejection, forever and ever and ever.

Still want to write?

In that case maybe, just maybe, you’re a writer. With the capital W. Or the lower case.

Best wishes, then, to  you, and me, and the rest of us.

Even poor Gaiman and GRRM. Who my heart goes out to, now, knowing what I know, fifteen rungs down the ladder.

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Even I have refused to talk about what I said this post was about, which was the pain of rejection; to clarify; on rejection, you will hate your story; you may hate yourself for writing it; you may hate yourself for submitting it;  you may think that there were edits that could have saved it that you know now, in hindsight, you should have made; you may think the story is entirely worthless. You may think that you are entirely worthless. Your friends will remind you that you are not the work. You will want to punch these friends in the fucking face for saying you are not the work. If you aren’t the work what are you? If the work isn’t you, what is it? You not being the work is every bit as bad as the work being rejected, thank you very much. You.

Smart friends will say that this is part of the process. You’ll want to punch them, too.

But know, that this is part of the process.

And yes, I know, you want to punch me.

I’d want to, too.

Six days into my Facebook cold-turkey.

The stress of leaving the 24-hour party that is, or was, my feed, induced a variety of symptoms. Medical symptoms. A perpetual throat-clearing tic got worse; panic and anxiety responses tamped down with meditation popped up again. Am I certain the fast caused these things? Not really, there’s no ‘control Jay’ who didn’t go off FB that I can compare my life to, but it seems to me that they’re related.

FB  bolstered the illusion of my being a professional writer; created this constant background bubble of voices and support. I could write something, an essay, a political screed, a joke, and within minutes have dozens or hundreds of people participating in the conversation.

FB was part of my professional identity as a writer.

The problem is, FB isn’t writing.

And a profession is something you make a living at.

I wish I could say that I’ve written a ton of fiction in the last week, but instead I’ve done production work for design clients and gone to the doctors and done stupid things to sooth and relax myself in place of FB. I had a huge backlog of production and design work, neglected while writing, that was going to get me eventually. I’m in the thick of it.

I recently have tried to re-learn how to read a newspaper. For years now my news has beeen embedded in my feed, and stuff branching off that. Without my feed, I find myself scanning the front page of new sites, wondering what I want to read, what I really care about, as opposed to what FBs algo’s think I care about.

I am pulling away from politics. Pulling away from debate around contentious issues.

That feels…. good?

A friend once told me that the strength of an organism can be measured by the quantity and robustness of its parasites. is it possible that FB is a kind of symptom of a version of me that works better than I’m working now? Even though it is obviously a huge time suck?

Am I just pointlessly driving myself crazy?

I’ll keep you posted.

I’ve been writing fiction on and off, mostly off, for twenty something years.

I completed the prestigious six-week, fiction writing workshop Clarion West in the 90s, after selling a handful of stories to smaller professional-paying national magazines.

In the last three years I’ve sold a dozen pieces to some of the biggest  magazines in the field, including nine pieces to Asimov’s SF and two to F&SF, the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

So, brief moment of elation, Yay! Got that over with. Now, on to the informative self-loathing.

At my wife’s insistence I listened to the Unmistakeable Creative Podcast “Rules for Focused Success in a distracted world,” a conversation with famously efficient person, Cal Newport.

So, if you want, go listen to that now and come back.

This led me to buy a copy of Cal’s latest book, Deep Work for my Kindle. There were fifty-two holds for it in the Cambridge Library Minuteman Network, and after listening to the podcast I was all hopped-up and giddy so I spent the fifteen bucks. Yes. Fifteen bucks.

So I’m working my way through it. It’s not hard to read, the prose is easy going; what’s hard about it is the title of this article, this understanding that I have been doing this writing thing pretty much all wrong forever, so reading the book I am forced to stop and cry periodically. (And my consciousness, quite honestly, is fragmented by decades of network culture. More on that later. If I remember.)

Rather than paraphrase Cal, I’ll invert his messages, in keeping with my title, and my general spirit of wrong-headedness, so you’ll know what not to do.

These are the George Castanza writing impulses. You feel them. But do the opposite.

• Write in short bursts, at infrequent, irregular intervals.
• Write in an environment filled with distraction.
• Write last. You have other stuff that is more important to do. Remember, your will power is infinite.
• Don’t finish what you write. Keep starting new things. Ruminate on the things you have started. But don’t finish them. Ruminate on them for years.
• If it is uncomfortable, at all, as you reach or stretch yourself, stop immediately. You could pull a brain muscle. And then where would you be, eh? Say, you notice you write 500 words and then you come up for air, and this is a pattern. Don’t push it. Don’t push your face back down into it. Just marvel at your 500 words. That’s twice what Hemmingway averaged a day. So you’re twice as good as him. Fire up Neflix, Twitter, Facebook, eat a tube of Pringles and drink a liter of Ginger Ale. You earned it.
• Do not study the work habits of your heroes, or other successful people. You are unique. Your success is assured. as long as you are true to yourself.
• If you want to make a change in your work patterns, set a very very stringent goal, and immediately hold yourself to it. As we know, this is how athletes are made. One day, you simply get up, and you run a marathon, shedding a hundred pounds in an afternoon, and you’re ready for the olympics. A period of sustained effort, reflection, trial and error, isn’t necessary. Your intent is all that matters.
• With any effort to modify your process, avoid metrics. Don’t keep score. Use your own seat of the pants gut feeling about how your changes are working out.

In all seriousness, what Cal has to say about the effects of network culture on our ability to do  hard things, to sustain effort, is horrifying. He summarizes many studies and books which I have been avoiding reading for years on these things. Which is great. You don’t have to read them. Cal did. He tells you about them.

The news isn’t good. But you knew that.

Cal venerates the wealthy more than I do, and he tiptoes around the examples of CEOs who are jacked into the matrix 24/7; while I’m willing to push Cal’s thesis even there—these people are probably just assholes riding some wave of good fortune and ruthlessness and the sweat of others—Cal makes excuses for them, as they must be, as we say in business, creating value. To earn so much money.

Sure. Got it.

He posits a ‘journalist’s style’ of Deep Focus, which some can cultivate through long practice, which permits a worklife heavily punctuated with interruption and distraction, but for most of us, Cal has a stoic’s message, which is mostly what you were afraid it was going to be. Here goes.

For those not wanting to invert the bullets above, I’ll just say it straight.

• Periods of long, intense, uninterrupted sustained effort are needed to cause the metabolic changes that make you better at something. (Nerve myelination is referenced in the book, the process whereby heavily used neurons insulate themselves and become faster firing)
• Distraction is distracting; at a deeper level, distraction produces _lingering deficits in cognition_ with every unfinished task in your inbox sucking away at your minds precious bodily fluids.
• Social media is stupid and smart people avoid it, if not always, then at least for set-aside periods of time to get shit done. He gives many examples. Oh. So many.
• There’s more, but that should be enough for now, to get you started on your own miserable inventory.

The good news? Cal is a positive guy, so his good news is that you realizing that business culture took a serious wrong turn and is now pushing idiotic, counterproductive stuff lets you get ahead, by figuring out how to wall off bits of time and focus for you to get your awesome on.

What dumb stuff is fashionable and bad, you ask? Open office plans; constant meetings and constant interruption; being forced to use social media, are all examples of mindless business fetish.

Oh, other good news is that all the stuff that business is wrongly focused on? Using easy-to-use social media tools? Churning out emails and attending meetings? Everything dumb? OK, AI is going to be doing more and more of the dumb stuff anyway. So Deep Work becomes more and more important, because by definition, it’s what can’t be automated.

So go Deep, and you stand a better chance of not being turned into Soylent Green by our new AI overlords, or the Koch Brothers or Donald Trump or whoever.

Whew! So. What’s next for me?

Figuring out how to put some of the horrible truth into practice.

He says, as he blogs. But. I’m focused here longer than I am on an FB post. So.

That’s a start.

Science Fiction has been and continues to be embroiled in a controversy around the representation of women, GLBTQIA characters and people of color.

There are fans who long for the good old days, when such people were mostly absent, and there are fans who are delighted by the inclusion of these viewpoints, and there are fans who claim not to care much, so long as they like the story in question.

William Gibson is famously quoted as saying that all spec fic is really about the present, in one way or another, and our present is very  much about these issues. Avoiding these characters in your body of work means you’re writing from another era, for another era.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that! But it’s not what I want to do.

But what about cultural appropriation and exploitation? When does a certain kind of stereotypical representation and story telling prove to be just as problematic as the white-washed world?

You have found the apparent double-bind. Ignore people unlike yourself and be part of one problem; do a half-assed job with them and become part of another.

What’s a writer to do?

Try. Fail. Try harder. Fail less.

First you have to try. If you think of yourself as a spec fic writer, who can write aliens and AIs,  role-playing the Other should prove doable—right? If girls and gays are inconceivable, maybe you should give up on the aliens and AIs… you’re not up to it.

Heh. But I kid my people.

Second, you need feedback, from the people you are attempting to represent fairly. You need beta readers, my friend. And  yes, perhaps this post should be titled ‘writer discovers an actual use for social media.’ (If you lack these kind of people in your feed, by the way, and or they won’t volunteer, well, there’s another data point for you!)

You need beta readers; POC beta readers, GLBTQ beta readers.

More than one per group would be good.

Whats the downside? You may find that after an honest back and forth your story is gone. It’s disappeared. The bulk of it no longer makes sense. It’s time to start over or write a new story.

You may find that your betas accept the story as written, but tell you, ‘we have enough of that story already. We know that story. Were tired of it.’ (Expect to hear this about stories including rape and suicide.)

So you may lose a story—by learning something, that will make you a better writer, and a better person.

That’s your worst case scenario.

So. Now you know what to do. Do it.