This will be my last column as President of the Guild, so I'd like to take this opportunity to thank everyone for the chance to be your leader for a year. Soon, we will have another set of officials taking charge. I'd like to thank them in advance for their willingness to fill these positions and for the work they will do in the coming year. Paul and I occasionally joke about how you've had aliens in charge of the group for the past twelve months and I am pleased to hand off to the reins to my compatriot, Nancy. Way to go, eh?
Something else I occasionally jest about at our bimonthly meetings is in response to the good news/bad news part of the business session. If you're not even getting bad news, that probably means you aren't sending material out.
Admittedly, this is probably the hardest part of writing as a business, but this difficulty has two vastly different components. One is the pure mechanics of submitting. Once you've gotten your story, poem, essay, interview or novel to the point where you're willing to send it out the door to face the world on its own two feet, you have to decide where to send it. Matching material to market is not always easy. I have numerous pieces sitting in My Documents that I have yet to match with a market. Some of them I believe to be fine works, but I simply don't know what to do with them.
Keeping works in circulation once you get them returned or rejected is time-consuming and requires a kind of effort very different from the act of creation. It is marketing and research and diligence.
I glossed over the second difficulty - deciding it is time to send something out and to actually do something about it. I'm willing to bet someone reading this has a work that is complete and possibly marketable yet the author can't make that leap of faith to submit the piece somewhere.
As artists, we are vulnerable to insecurities about what we create. If we send something out, it may be rejected. Are we prepared to face that? If we send something out, it may be accepted! Are we prepared to have our work, our private, intimate creations, exposed for the world to see? It can be akin to ripping open our consciences and letting our emotions lay bare. It's daunting. Perhaps it is safer if what we write stays on our hard drive or in our drawer.
Being a writer is never about playing it safe, though. We do this because we think we have something to say. So, I issue this challenge to all members of the Woodlands Writers Guild. When January 1, 2002 rolls around, I want everyone to resolve to collect at least three rejection letters in the coming year and to announce each rejection proudly at one of our meetings. We applaud rejection as much as acceptance because it is a sign we are submitting, taking that risk. Daring to be accepted.