Purple Power

Today I got a really great rejection. I say this without sarcasm; I was rejected in the best way possible, with encouragement that my manuscript is good enough to be published in the future (even though this press was rejecting me), and with specific comments on my writing that lifted my spirits. The best part is that this came from a press I consider out of my league, that I only submitted to because the timing was good for me, which it had never been before with this press.

I had been considering whether to stop submitting this manuscript for the time being, but now I will continue (though in the months between when I submitted to this press and today I have strengthened it considerably by pulling the weaker poems and inserting a new section of linked prose poems which I think are pretty strong). I have hope again when until this morning it had been waning.

When I went to enter this rejection in my submissions spreadsheet, I was about to change all the information to red (I color-code my worksheet: black for outstanding submissions, red for rejections, green for withdrawals, and blue for acceptances). I was thinking what a shame it was to code this entry red when I was actually feeling pretty good about the rejection, when I remembered that a month ago I had also received a very encouraging rejection (I'd had to withdraw some poems from the submission when they were accepted elsewhere, and this journal told me they had been very interested in the entire group, and were disappointed when the withdrawal made it impossible to publish the entirety) and had decided to code it in purple because red didn't really reflect what it meant to me. So I happily coded this near miss purple too.

This is, I think, a good practice: to consider encouraging rejections as positive, and to remember them that way. Now when I see purple on my spreadsheet, I'll feel encouraged (not as encouraged as when I see blue entries in a sea of red, but still...). Appreciate your near misses; not everybody gets them.