Rejections R Us (NEW CONCEPTS)

[Mick Harper]

Announcing a new thread

All of us here fancy ourselves as creative artists of one sort or another. All of us have failed at every turn (most turns). So I thought it would be useful to hear how we failed. At what we failed. Either to learn the lessons or for just straight catharsis.

Especially interesting is when you fail by success. That's a snare and a delusion every time. Remember the AE dictum about not judging by results? So I'm going to get the ball rolling with How I Became A Writer. It was so easy...

[Mick Harper]

I was living with a radical lawyer in a squat. He said to me one day, "You fancy yourself as a writer, Mick, how about writing a book with me?"
"About what?"
"The Rent Act."
"Duh."
"I'll do all the technical stuff. Your job is to describe how to work the angles. How anyone can get a flat with full security of tenure at a pipsqueak rent just by filling in the right form."
"OK."

It turned out 'the technical stuff' was written in impenetrable legalese so I ended up writing the whole book myself but that was all right. Piece of piss really.

* Someone suggested a prominent publisher, they said OK to the book.
* Someone suggested a prominent literary agent, he said OK to me.
* The book was sent out 'to the media', I got half a page in the Daily Express.

[Pete Jones]

I was a sophomore trying to decide which writing class to take to fill the baccalaureate requirement. Business Writing or Creative Writing fit my time slot. I choose Creative because it sounded more fun. It was fun, and I declared as a literature major immediately.

My first short story in that class won the campus literary prize (the teacher had entered it in the contest, unbeknownst).

On the story's back (and a few others), I got accepted to a graduate program. Highlight of that effort was a personalized rejection letter from an editor at The New Yorker, to whom I'm still able to send stories directly and bypass the slush pile. I never did again.

Why? I read all of Tolstoy in a 4 month period in 2014 and decided there was absolutely no reason to do what I was doing, fiction-wise, ever again.

[Wile E. Coyote]

Wiley is not an artist, I don't really understand how it works, I have failed at a couple of sports and one game, it is actually remarkably easy for the average person to reach top county, top club level at stuff, if you train a bit, but in my own experience it's really difficult to get past that.

At some point you need to take a decision based on something like, am I going to be the best in the country, unlikely as you lack the raw talent of a Nigel Short (who I had lost to), or am I going to get a high-flying job, a hot partner, a mansion, and change the world.

It's not that difficult a choice.

It's only a bit later that you realise you probably are going to fail with the latter as well.......

[Mick Harper]

I had a similar experience to Pete's when I wrote a hostile squib for my brother, him being a leading figure at a quasi-academic conference and me a visiting kid brother. I left it on his bed assuming he'd know who it was from. He didn't and circulated it round the conference to some epic consternation.

Success first time out and dire failure thereafter is a very familiar pattern. As you will see from my next book outing. But the syndrome hit me hardest when I worked out an AE angle for internet poker tournaments and won practically every time. Until I decided to take it seriously as my main source of income whereupon I never won again.

[Mick Harper]

What I discovered is that if you did 'hack work', i.e. wrote stuff either at someone else's behest or off your own bat but at the public's behest, you would have no difficulty flourishing. You probably wouldn't earn your living at it, but you'd make a small name for yourself.

By hack work I don't mean bad work--it might be transcendently good. War & Peace is hack work. I just mean 'working within established parameters'. And by not being within established parameters, I don't mean conspiracy theory or fruitcake. Neither of these genres existed in those pre-internet days. Or rather they did, but they were just accepted genres.

Of course I didn't know what I was myself either, only that I was an oddball. I thought this would be rather in my favour. So it proved at first when I tried to break into the then nascent adult games industry. I started successfully sending in offbeat pieces about board games and casino games.

Then I discovered something else. If you put a foot wrong in a world of True Believers, you get blackballed for life.

[Mick Harper]

This is on account of something every newbie writer has to learn.

[Mick Harper]

You have to believe in the lucky break. Though you've got to keep buying tickets to the lottery and you've got to keep trying out different lotteries. And you've got to enjoy 'doing the lottery' else you'll give up and become a straight long before the winning ticket doesn't arrive.

[Mick Harper]

Since nobody was beating a door to my drum with requests for anything mainstream, and they were turning down anything unconventional, after ten years or so I finally decided to choose some madcap theory I had come up with--there were plenty to choose from--and publish it myself.

This was in the days when nobody was doing that apart from via vanity publishing so I thought it would have to be short, sweet and interesting. So I wrote THOBR and had two thousand copies printed (oh, the naive optimism).

I then sent out a fair few as review copies and got (oh, the naive optimism) a fair few reviews. Some rave, all in recognisable media. I was quite busy, and making a bit of dosh, parcelling up orders while waiting for recognition as a major new voice. THOBR after all did rewrite a lot of British and European history.

It never came--rather the reverse, if you see what I mean--until one very long shot turned up trumps...

[Mick Harper]

Before I reveal the name of this wondrous patron I should point out that what you are looking for are people who don't just think your work is interesting, worth reading, worth buying, ingenious, ground-breaking or whatever. However welcome such people are. You are looking for people with the rare ability to recognise

[Mick Harper]

Anyway, in this case, that person was our very own Ishmael.

After finding exposure in the MSM wasn't doing the trick I sent the book to various internet sites that seemed promising. This got a bit of airtime but mostly highly negative. Either way it petered into the sands.

The one exception was Graham Hancock's site where Ishmael was the editor (the founder? he'll know). He immediately saw the true worth of the book (and me) and I wrote a new piece for the site, at his invitation. (Quite a good piece, I thought, pointing out the River Nile wasn't what we thought it was.)

That in itself didn't lead anywhere either but it did forge the Harper/ Ishmael axis which did lead somewhere...

[Mick Harper]

The two of us set up The Quest, basically a forum for--as they weren't known at the time--budding applied epistemologists. This actually took off, in a minor but immensely satisfying way. We even pioneered a new genre, the intellectual Treasure Hunt, which I'll tell you about tomorrow.

[Ishmael]

[Ishmael]

[Mick Harper]