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Rejection for a writer is only the beginning my friends. If you are a writer, you should get used to being rejected on a regular basis. In fact, if you are a writer, you have been rejected before. They say you really aren't a writer until you have been rejected at least ten times, and sometimes you will get rejected more often than that before you get a good break. Writing is an interesting skill, and a fickle industry to be working in.

The interesting thing about the industry is that I think some of the younger writers aren't really used to being rejected in the traditional sense. In my own experience, I have only been rejected a couple of times formally, and the rest of the rejections have simply been rejections from websites most likely for technical reasons. The way you get a rejection letter these days seems to be a lot different than even a few years ago.

What I mean is that the time it takes for a publisher to make a decision these days is a lot faster. I remember waiting six months or more for a submission to be accepted or rejected. Now when I write for an Internet site, or in the Marketplace, it can take just a few weeks to hear back from a publisher, and you can even ask for an update sooner than that.

This is good because you need to get that feedback as soon as possible. It is hard to make a submission, and write other submissions in the same style, and then just find out that one was rejected, but have no feedback. Then all you get is a slew of rejections over the coming months, or years. Sometimes you just get your submission back, and that just hurts.

When you get rejected, you have to just keep carrying on. I have submitted the same piece to two or three different places, and one gets rejected, and the other accepts it. You just never know where you are going to be accepted. The key is to keep learning, and if you do get feedback, you have to learn how incorporate it into your writing. That is how you get to the top of the mountain.

Rejection is really only the beginning of the process for most writers. When you tally up the wins and losses over the years, you will find that you have roughly the same record as the Oakland Raiders this decade. It can be rough, but you know it will all pay off if you keep working, and keep learning.

Learn more about this author, Cody Hodge.
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