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| Author Kourtney Heintz |
How
to Bounce Back from Rejection
Rejection is
inevitable. It can take 100s of Nos
to get that one Yes. I say this with
certainty because it’s been seven years since I started my writing journey.
Between my two novels, I racked up 400 rejections.
I’m not going to
lie. Some hurt more than others. The cold query rejection was the least
painful. Stung like a paper cut. Usually it meant the query needed work,
sometimes it meant my idea wasn’t grabbing that agent.
Rejections on
full manuscript requests hurt more. Because you knew they read some of your
work and decided it wasn’t good enough. You couldn’t brush it off as an issue
with the presentation of the idea. No, this was a problem with the
storytelling. Several of these meant a serious revision was in order.
The revise and resubmit
rejection annihilated me. Like a pack of yellowjackets attacking my heart. I
had no idea how to make the book better. It was the best thing I had written.
It was a rejection of everything I’d worked so hard to create. It was a
rejection of me.
How did I keep
going? I have an arsenal of coping techniques. You have to when you spend years
dealing with something.
Crying helped.
Raging at the world. Venting privately to friends. Pouting. I let myself have a
couple days to wallow.
And then I would
step back. Give myself a sabbatical from
writing. I needed to want to write more than I wanted to avoid the pain of
rejection.
Sometimes it was
a few days. With the cold query rejections, I was back on my pogo stick in a
day or two. Other times--after several full manuscript rejections or the revise
and resubmit rejection--it was a few months. Inevitably, the need to write
overcame everything else.
But I had to
allow myself a break. To understand what my days were like without the writing.
To feel the emptiness and want to fill it.
Another way to
cope with rejection is to bundle work into projects. Some projects can happen
at the same time, others require my complete focus. When I’m querying, I’m also
drafting. But when I’m revising, I’m just revising. You have to build in those
breaks from querying. Because querying can be a soul-sucking experience.
There have to be
periods where you do what you love: write stories and polish them. That’s the
best part of being a writer and you need to connect with
it and feel it. You need to know that this is why you keep going in the face of
rejection.
The Six Train to Wisconsin
Back Cover:
Sometimes saving the person
you love can cost you everything.
There is one
person that ties Oliver Richter to this world: his wife Kai. For Kai, Oliver is
the keeper of her secrets.
When her
telepathy spirals out of control and inundates her mind with the thoughts and
emotions of everyone within a half-mile radius, the life they built together in
Manhattan is threatened.
To save her,
Oliver brings her to the hometown he abandoned—Butternut, Wisconsin—where the
secrets of his past remain buried. But the past has a way of refusing to stay
dead. Can Kai save Oliver before his secrets claim their future?
An emotionally
powerful debut, The Six Train to
Wisconsin pushes the bounds of love as it explores devotion, forgiveness
and acceptance.
Author Bio:
Kourtney Heintz
writes emotionally evocative speculative fiction that captures the deepest
truths of being human. For her characters, love is a journey never a
destination.
She resides in
Connecticut with her warrior lapdog, Emerson, her supportive parents and three
quirky golden retrievers. Years of working on Wall Street provided the perfect
backdrop for her imagination to run amuck at night, imagining a world where
out-of-control telepathy and buried secrets collide.
Her debut novel,
The Six Train to Wisconsin, was a
2012 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award Semifinalist.
Website: http://kourtneyheintz.com
Facebook Page: http://www.facebook.com/kourtneyheintzwriter
Twitter: http://twitter.com/KourHei
Amazon Author Central Page:
http://amazon.com/author/kourtneyheintz
Buy Links
Paperback available from:
Barnes
and Noble
Ebook
available from:
Goodreads Six Train giveaways
going on until July 1:
5 free signed copies of my book (US only): http://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/show/54224-the-six-train-to-wisconsin
For Canadians, 1
signed copy:
Several other
countries can win 1 signed copy: http://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/show/54217-the-six-train-to-wisconsin
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