Regarding Rejection

I stayed up way too late the other night to finish Maggie, Charles Martin's sequel to The Dead Don't Dance. The novel's ending, not surprisingly, required a tissue or two. But I didn't close the book after the final paragraph.

Nope. I also read the "Acknowledgements" section where Mr. Martin takes us back to the summer of the year 2000. A nearby file folder holds eighty-five rejection letters. On a yellow note stuck to his computer is the number 126, "the number of times that F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise had been rejected."

As he sat there, discouraged and ready to give up, his wife hands him another letter for the rejection folder. Martin writes, "She laid it on the desk, kissed me, and shook her head, 'You're not a reject to me.'" Six books later, Martin is a critically acclaimed author. He credits his perseverance to his wife, who "reached down beyond my fear and doubt, down where my love lives, and gave me a gift -- she stood beside me and believed."

These pages resonated with me as I read them the other night. Several days before I had received an email from an editor. A rejection email. A gracious and encouraging note that took the sting out of the no, but still a rejection.

Thanks to supportive family and friends who believe in me and who believe in my story, I'm not giving up. If I have to, I will persevere under the weight of a hundred more rejections. Maybe even 126.

What keeps you going when the rejection folder bulges?

Johnnie

[Note: quotations from Maggie, 2006, pages 303, 307.]