Why I Love Receiving Rejections

Why I Love Receiving Rejections
Rejections and failures are a huge part of life in general. And if you’re a writer, you get them all the time. I’ve gotten three rejections so far this week–and this actually makes me really happy.
 
Right now, I’m in the process of submitting a novel, a graphic novel script, and three short stories for publication. I’m also revising a personal essay to submit to a competition next week, and revising a play to submit to a ten-minute playwriting festival.
 
If I have that many things in my submission queue, it means that I’m getting a lot of rejections. A few of my short stories have been published the first time I’ve submitted them; most of them I’ve had to submit four or five times until I’ve found the right home for them. And some of my polished stories have never found homes, despite my best efforts.  
 
Over time, I’ve developed a bit of a thick skin (thank you, grad school). But really, rejection is not failure. Rejection means I’m trying, I’m putting myself out there–I’m taking big risks. Rejection means that I’m challenging myself, I’m putting in the mandatory effort. Sometimes a rejection means that my writing wasn’t good enough, or used a cliched trope. Sometimes they recently published something too similar. And sometimes the writing is great, but they don’t love it–it’s not a match for them (publishing is like dating–two awesome people do not always make an awesome couple).
 
Two of the rejections I received this week are what is called a “form letter,” basically a “Dear Author, your story was not what we were looking for. Good luck.” In one of the form letters I got this week, it literally said “Dear Author”–and I can’t blame them, as editors and agents often have hundreds of submissions to read in a day.
 
Another rejection I received was personalized. They said my short story was well-written, and then said specifically why it isn’t a match for their magazine (they prefer stories where the fantasy element is more integral to the plot rather than the background). And then they said, “we would be happy to see more from you in the future.” This is the second, very personalized rejection letter I’ve received for the story, and I get the feeling that it’s catching attention, and that it will find a home, as long as I don’t give up, as long as I keep at it.
To me, rejections aren’t an invitation to give up. They’re a sign that I’m going somewhere.

Writing 2016: A Year in Photos

New BabyI set my writing goals lower this year because of having a new baby. But I am proud to report that I still can write with three young children.

My Writing Goal for 2016 = 400 hours

Actual Time I Spent Writing in 2016 = 530 hours

That’s almost 1.5 hours per day. For comparison, I wrote 600 hours in 2015 and 520 hours in 2014.

One of the most common questions I get is How do you find time to write with three kids? I think an equally appropriate question would be, How does anyone with three kids find time to eat or shower or exercise? Or, equally appropriate, How does anyone with a full-time job find time to write?

I think you can treat something creative like just as much of a necessity in your life as eating, you can create good habits, you can train yourself to use small amounts of time and moments of low-energy to create. And if you really want it, you can cut out other things. I used to read over 75 novels a year, and while I still read a lot, I don’t read nearly as many now. I cut out my favorite TV shows. All of them. I sacrifice things that I want and that I love every single day that I write. I wasn’t always ready or willing to make that sort of sacrifice and commitment, but for the past three years I have been.

How did I spend those 530 hours of writing time?

Caught Writing (Photograph by my daughter)I revised my steampunk novel, completing several more drafts of it. Near the end of the year it hit the point where it was as finished as I can make it. So I am now submitting.

I also wrote and revised a graphic novel script, based off a novella I wrote several years ago. I love graphic novels, and I loved learning how to write in the form, something that was made much easier by doing a Media Arts/Film minor in college.

I also guest edited the 5th Annual Mormon Lit Blitz, a contest for LDS micro-literature (fiction, essays, and poetry, all under 1000 words). I did contest promotion (including guest blogging), was one of three judges for over one hundred entries, helped edit the selected finalists, and ran the voting. It was a lot of work, but worth it. I also enjoyed trying on an editor’s hat for a competition I’ve been involved in as a writer.

The 2016 Mormon Lit Blitz

365 TomorrowsShort Fiction

My flash fiction story, “Misunderstood,” was published in 365 Tomorrows.

I didn’t write as many short stories this year–I wrote two new short stories and revised two other short stories. And because I wasn’t writing as many short stories, I wasn’t submitting as many–but I did submit.

Over the course of the year, I received eight rejections and two acceptances. One of those acceptances was for “Misunderstood.” The other was for…

The Last BathroomThe Last Bathroom,” which was published in the humor magazine Defenestration.

I sometimes write really weird stuff, like genre-bending stories featuring superheroes visiting all the bathrooms in the city during the apocalypse. So I was really happy to find the perfect home for this piece.

Interrupting all of my writing was a cross-country move, from Phoenix, Arizona to Kalamazoo, Michigan. The picture is of everything we own, stuffed into a moving truck.

img_6514-large

I was sad to say goodbye to a lot of really good writing friends in Arizona, and several critique groups.

A Critique Group

In my critique group named “WeeWa” we even figured out how to use a selfie stick.

Our new rental in Michigan has a basement–so I claimed part of it as my own and created a writing corner.

My Writing Corner, Pre-Flood

Isn’t that just beautiful? The steampunk poster that reads “On to the Next Chapter” was hand painted by my friend Dena Haynes, who is both an incredible writer and artist.

Unfortunately, ten days after I finished making my writing corner look beautiful, our basement flooded. Water poured through the air ventilation system, which is not waterproof, so it basically rained throughout our entire basement.

My Ruined Writing Space

Yes, those are waterlogged ceiling tiles that used to be above the desk.

I was kind of heartbroken by the damage to my beautiful space. I kind of still am, in fact. I’m also heartbroken by the fact that all of my old drafts for my different projects, with all my beautiful, hand-written notes on them, were ruined. I do have each completed draft digitally, and my twelve foot outline for my steampunk novel survived. My writing posters did not get a drop of water on them–hallelujah.

The owner of the house is still working with the insurance company, and theoretically the basement will be fixed soon. (It’s been over two months, and as a writer I am always wary of ambiguous words like “soon.”) My husband still works downstairs in the evening, but I haven’t written a word downstairs since the flood.

However, I have still written.

Portrait of me working on my computer, taken without my awareness, probably by my 5-year-old daughter.

Portrait of me working on my computer, taken without my awareness, probably by my 5-year-old daughter.

I did a lot of critiques this year–I critiqued at least ten full novels, a bunch of essays, and other miscellaneous things that needed a bit of love. I like critiquing because it keeps me fresh and focused and helps me in viewing my own work in a critical light.

I also edited a fashion textbook–both with a content and copy edit. Afterwards, the fashion consultant author took me shopping, and I now know how to buy jeans that truly fit me. (I spent so many years not knowing what I was missing–seriously, my life has been changed.)

And I spent at least fifty hours (which was not counted in my total writing hours) doing a data coding project to help my husband out on his dissertation.

But that is not all!

 

Katherine Cowley Presenting at Time Out for Writers

I presented on “Writing Powerful Story Beats” during the online LDS Beta Readers conference–you can watch the video on youtube. And in September I taught two classes at the “Time Out for Writers” conference in Phoenix (one class was on Optimizing Your Author Website and the other was on Worldbuilding).

And that, folks, is my writing year. I have great writing plans for 2017.

10 Questions for Avoiding Deus ex Machina in Fantasy and Science Fiction

10 Questions for Avoiding Deus ex Machina in Science Fiction and Fantasy

Helios in his chariot, 4th century BC, Athena’s Temple in Ilion. Image credit: Gryffindor (public domain)

Deus ex machina literally means “God in the machine.” My first introduction to it was as a 15 year old reading the Greek tragedy Medea. Medea kills her children, but is saved, at the last moment, by the sun god sending down a chariot to take her away. The Greeks would actually use a crane to lower someone or something onto the stage to save the day.

Jeff Vandermeer, in Wonderbook writes: “The very thing that readers love about fantasy, for example, can backfire… Fantasy writers may also feel some pressure to ‘get out of jail free’ by using the fantasy element to create closure when it hasn’t been earned by the characters or events in the story. Because everything is possible, nothing has any tension…or any weight. The bit of magic that resolves things too easily or the singular invention or the sudden rescue—there are parallels in contemporary realism, but they don’t stand out quite so much. There’s nothing like a sudden dragon blasting across the page to signal an unintentional celebration of spectacular coincidence…”

10 Questions for Avoiding Deus Ex Machina in Science Fiction and Fantasy

Is someone solving the problem that is not the main character? Is someone else saving the main character? And does this happen near the end of the book?

Why can’t the main character solve the problem or save herself?

Is the person saving the day an important secondary character? Have you properly foreshadowed their relationship with the main character and the tools that they have to save the day?

Can the main character do something earlier to pave the way for them being saved now?

Can I foreshadow this so it doesn’t feel completely random?

Even while being saved by someone else, can the main character be active—doing something and contributing?

If the main character is being saved now, can she still solve the main conflict of the novel on her own?

Read the rest of my presentation on Rule-Based Worldbuilding

Rule-Based Worldbuilding for Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Steampunk

Just because you are writing speculative fiction, it doesn’t mean you can do whatever you want. Your readers expect a cohesive, coherent world. That is why you need rule-based worldbuilding: you set up the rules of a world, and then you stick to them.

This presentation was originally given at the ANWA 2016 Time Out for Writers in Tempe, Arizona.

Steel and Bone
My steampunk story, “The Clockwork Seer,” is available on Kindle and in paperback on Amazon.

Key quotes on Rule-Based Worldbuilding:

David Anthony Durham (author of epic fantasy and historical fiction): “There’s an element of freedom in worldbuilding, but I’d call it a ‘responsibility’ as well—to establish the rules of your world and then live by them. I can decide to plop a desert down here and mountain range over there, but then I—and my characters—have to live with the challenges created by that. I don’t unmake stuff when it poses problems. Just the opposite. Watching how characters are bound and challenged by the things I created is what it’s all about.”

In 1893 the Scottish author George MacDonald wrote in “The Fantastic Imagination”: “man may, if he pleases, invent a little world of his own, with its own laws.

“His world once invented, the highest law that comes next into play is, that there shall be harmony between the laws by which the new world has begun to exist; and in the process of his creation, the inventor must hold by those laws. The moment he forgets one of them, he makes the story, by its own postulates, incredible. To be able to live a moment in an imagined world, we must see the laws of its existence obeyed. Those broken, we fall out of it. The imagination in us, whose exercise is essential to the most temporary submission to the imagination of another, immediately, with the disappearance of Law, ceases to act…. A man’s inventions may be stupid or clever, but if he does not hold by the laws of them, or if he makes one law jar with another, he contradicts himself as an inventor, he is no artist….Obeying law, the maker works like his creator; not obeying law, he is such a fool as heaps a pile of stones and calls it a church.”

In “On Fairy-stories” J. R. R. Tolkien wrote: “the storymaker…makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is ‘true’: it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it while you are, as it were, inside. The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed. You are then out in the Primary World again, looking at the little abortive Secondary World from outside.”

Jeff Vandermeer, in Wonderbook: “The very thing that readers love about fantasy, for example, can backfire… Fantasy writers may also feel some pressure to ‘get out of jail free’ by using the fantasy element to create closure when it hasn’t been earned by the characters or events in the story. Because everything is possible, nothing has any tension…or any weight. The bit of magic that resolves things too easily or the singular invention or the sudden rescue—there are parallels in contemporary realism, but they don’t stand out quite so much. There’s nothing like a sudden dragon blasting across the page to signal an unintentional celebration of spectacular coincidence…”

Rule-Based Worldbuilding and Plot Structure: I wrote several paragraphs and ten questions on avoiding deus ex machina in science fiction and fantasy.

Rule Based Worldbuilding for Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Steampunk

ANWA Presentation: Optimizing Your Author Website for Google and Social Media

To really optimize your author website, you need to do more than just SEO: you need to make your website content stimulating, searchable, sharable, and savable. Additionally, ideas are given for unpublished authors on how to start a website and what to blog about. This presentation was given at the ANWA Time Out For Writer’s Conference on September 16, 2016.

List of Ideas for Published and Unpublished Authors to Blog About:

±Short stories

±Poetry

±Comics

±Art

±Photo a Day

±Personal Writing Process

±Personal Inspiration

±Writers you admire

±Book reviews

±Movie reviews

±Something related to craft you’ve gone searching for and not found  a good answer

±Life updates

±Travel/Events

±Your non-writing hobby

±Where you live (i.e. parks/ historic sites/history etc.)

±Subjects your characters care about

±Top 10 Lists

±Your Genre

±Subjects your characters care about

±Resources for Readers (i.e. genre compilation lists)

±How to Guides

±Soundtracks to your book/life

±Cooking/Crafts

±Kids/Family/Church

±Rhetorical treatises on things you care about

±Satire

±Current events

±Dream cast the characters in your stories

±Your favorite first lines from books in your genre

±Create a Buzzfeed style quiz about something you care about

±Season/month/holiday theme

±Languages and foreign lands

±Grammar misused “in the wild”

±Favorite authors

±Creative history of a subject you care about

±Things you collect

±Quotes to inspire

±Book trailer

±Fan book trailers or art

±Concerts, writing conferences, and special events

±Word history/analysis

Useful Links

Note: I didn’t have time to actually turn these into hyperlinks yet, but that will happen ASAP.

The platform I use for my website: WordPress

Email subscription service (free up to 1000 subscribers): MailChimp

Image Editing and Creation: Canva

Keyword Research: Keywordtool.io

More Keyword Research: do a Google search

WordPress SEO Plugin: Yoast SEO

Advanced Keyword Research: kwfinder.com and semrush.com

Creative Commons searches–make sure you perform an advanced search so it’s an image you have rights to use. If it requires attribution, then attribute it in your post: Flickr, Google, Bing, Google, Wikimedia Commons

Free stock photos (no attribution required): Pexels

Learn to write good titles and blog posts: Buzzfeed

Plugins I Use on My Website:

Akismet (spam filter)

All in One Favicon

Easy Forms for MailChimp by YIKES

Exclude Pages from Navigation

Special Recent Posts Free Edition

Yoast SEO

Coming soon… other good plugins (will update this weekend)

Optimizing Your Author Website for Google & Social Media

“The Last Bathroom” in Defenestration Magazine

The Last Bathroom: a superhero comedy by Katherine Cowley, published in Defenestration Magazine

I have a new short story that was recently published. It’s called “The Last Bathroom” and it’s a superhero comedy involving extraterrestrial bugs, the end of the world, and a search for the perfect restroom. You can read it online in the August 2016 issue of Defenestration.

Dreamcasting “The Last Bathroom”

If “The Last Bathroom” were made into a movie (and for all you Hollywood producers out there, I’m willing to sell you film rights!) then it would need some pretty incredible actresses.

For the role of Quintessence, I picture Leslie Jones (image from Ghostbusters).

Leslie Jones

For Hoshi, I’m thinking Rila Fukushima (clip of her as Yukio in The Wolverine).

Background to the Story

There are spoilers to the story in this section, so if you haven’t already, go read “The Last Bathroom” and come back.

The seed of this story has been sitting in my mind for years, but I never thought of it as a story idea. I was simply bothered and/or amused by the verbiage on paper towel dispenser. Because seriously–two hands only? Emergency feed?

Then last summer I ran into one of those paper towel dispensers at a hardware store and I realized it had been quite a while since I’d seen one. I wondered if there was some sort of true emergency that could actually requiring turning the side knob.

Fast forward to last November. I was poring through baby name lists with my husband. We stumbled across the name Quintessence and I loved it–I thought it would be the perfect superhero name. I could already visually picture her in my head: a strong (both emotionally and physically) African American woman in her forties or fifties, saving the day. But I didn’t know what her story was.

I thought maybe she worked for the Drug Enforcement Agency as an undercover agent in Europe (I pictured her flying around in helicopters and infiltrating meetings) so I read a memoir from a retired DEA agent, but it didn’t quite work for me. And then I realized I still wanted to write a paper towel story and that maybe that was the right place for Quintessence.

But I still needed a disaster that would cause an emergency. I didn’t want a singular bad guy–I was interested more in a force of nature antagonist. And then I remembered reading about locusts in a book on medieval pest control and realized that extraterrestrial locusts would be perfect for the story. When I started writing I didn’t consciously decide it was going to be humorous, but that’s what inevitably happens when you add a bathroom quest to a superhero plot.

I wrote the first draft in a couple of days because I needed something to bring to one of my writing groups. Subsequently it went through a lot of drafts, each time getting a little bit better.

Frequently Asked Question: Why isn’t this a longer story?

My writing group tried to convince me to turn this into a novel. Other readers expressed wanting “more.” And a few of my friends proposed that I write a short story collection in the same world, featuring others with the same powers.

At this moment in time, I have no plans to continue in this story world. I am intentionally evil–I love writing short stories that are complete in and of themselves, and yet imply a much bigger world with so many other stories in it. And maybe I will come back to it some day. But for the time being, you’re welcome to imagine the possibilities.