03 February 1996
I went to a writers' evening because isolation had begun to make everything echo. There were biscuits, folding chairs, earnest scarves, and several people who have converted rejection into a personality.
The advice was not stupid. That is what made it unbearable. Keep submitting. Start something new. Do not let one agent define the work. Treat each rejection as information. Make a schedule. Join a group. Build a readership. All of it correct. All of it bloodless.
There is a species of literary optimism that seems designed to keep people obedient. It speaks gently and carries a clipboard. It does not deny pain; it domesticates it. It turns rage into process, grief into networking, humiliation into a useful lesson for the next draft.
I came home with four addresses, two magazine names, and a sharp desire never to become the kind of writer who tells another writer that disappointment is good material. Disappointment is not material. It is weather if it passes and climate if it stays.
Still, I wrote for an hour before bed, because apparently I can distrust the sermon and remain trapped in the church.