My novel was published four years ago now, and I am often asked when the next one will be out. Good question! I have completed a second novel; not a sequel to When It’s Over, but something completely different. This story, based on my years of clinical experience, is set in contemporary California, and features a young lesbian, paralyzed in a car accident, struggling to rebuild her life on the rehabilitation unit. She forms a close bond with a dedicated physical therapist who tries to rescue her, upending her own life in the process. I wanted to write a story with a spinal cord-injured protagonist who is neither a tragic figure whose life is over, nor a superhero, but a normal woman trying to redefine herself and find a new community—like the hundreds of patients I’ve had the privilege of working with throughout my career.
Like any novel, this has been through major revisions. I have trusted “beta readers” and writing critique partners and a professional editor who read the early drafts and provided valuable suggestions for improvement. And a few months ago, I went through the whole manuscript again, tweaking this, adding here, subtracting there, and I think it’s pretty good. But I haven’t yet found a publisher. Several agents requested the full manuscript and made positive comments, but politely declined to take it on with the ubiquitous explanation that it “wasn’t quite right” for them. I haven’t given up. I still believe in this novel. I’m now submitting it to small presses that do not require an agent, still accumulating rejections, but as everyone in this business knows, it’s such a subjective process. Hope springs eternal in the heart of a writer. It only takes one Yes! to get it out into the world.
In the meantime, I’ve been working on short fiction stories and creative non-fiction pieces and submitting them to literary magazines. This is another process that requires diligence, patience, and a hard skin in the face of rejections. There are hundreds of literary journals, all with different styles and interests, submission criteria and deadlines, and varying places on a hierarchy from extremely prestigious AKA impossible to get into, down to dinky little magazines that neither you (or anyone else) has ever heard of. Navigating this and figuring out an appropriate submission strategy and a method of keeping track of it all, is not for the faint of heart.
To get started, I attended a one-day class at Berkeley’s Writing Salon many years ago and have been figuring the rest out as I go along. I now subscribe to email notifications generously provided by writers such as Trish Hopkinson, Erica Verillo and Erica Dreifus, and follow the Facebook page Calls for Submissions in search of opportunities where a story I have, or could write, might fit in. I’ve been submitting to journals for ten years now—and have hundreds of rejections to show for it.
But some success! Initially, mostly with my creative non-fiction/short memoir pieces. I’m not sure why, but it seems easier to get this type of work accepted. The respected journal Poets and Writers maintains an Authors Directory; you can apply to be listed as a writer of either Fiction or Nonfiction (or both.) Acceptance is dependent on having a minimum number of published works. I reached the milestone for non-fiction in 2016 but fell short in the fiction category. They would not accept my novel as evidence that I can write fiction because my publisher, She Writes Press, is classified as a so-called hybrid, not a traditional publisher. That’s a story for another time, but this irked me, and I was determined to earn a place as a writer of fiction.
Don’t ask me why. Whoever checks out this directory anyway? But I set myself a goal and went for it, writing new stories, dusting off and revising old ones, and more recently trying my hand at flash fiction, typically defined as under 1000 words. I had one fiction story accepted in 2017, but then faced a long dry spell, with lots of rejections, a few coveted “personal rejections,” which are like consolation prizes, except all you get are little notes telling you some editor liked the “tone” of your story or that it “almost made it.”
But in 2021, either my luck, or my skill, or my submission strategy, or possibly all three improved, and I started seeing responses that began with the word: Congratulations! One story, Buried, went through four different drafts and two title changes, and was rejected by sixty journals before finding a home at the Forge Literary Magazine. Two more stories were published last year, and now the new year is off to a nice start with another acceptance. When this last story is published, at a date still to be determined, I will finally qualify as a fiction writer for Poets and Writers. Time to break out the Champagne!