The Rejection Garden is less about rejection and more about creativity, persistence, and joy.
Over the next month, I am going to share one Tree or Manuscript with you, not in its entirety, instead,
I’ll post a synopsis, how many times it has been rejected, and then,
I’ll finish with my favorite line and include a picture of the tree and name tag.
"Rejection has value. It teaches us when our work or our skillset is not good enough and must be made better... Rejection refines us. Those who fall prey to its enervating soul-sucking tentacles are doomed. Those who persist past it are survivors. Best ask yourself the question: what kind of writer are you? The kind who survives? or the kind who gets asphyxiated by the tentacles of woe?
- Check Wendig
4 submissions, 4 rejections
Tree/Story 9- Dinosaur Blues
Ack! A rhyming picture book. I MUST be insane to one- write it, two-send it out. I must be...
Nonetheless, I love this piece.
One day driving down the viaduct (no longer standing) in Seattle, along the port, my brain, wired differently (neurodivergent), turned the shapes of the cranes into dinosaurs and popped a line that repeated in my head. "Mama likes to sing the blues, but only when it rains." Suddenly the graffiti'd stacks of shipping containers I was driving by turned into monsters and an idea bubbled up as I wondered about the operators of the huge steel dinosaurs (cranes). When back home I discovered that women were only allowed to become operators in 1999. Then I wondered if they had children, and what it would be like to be the child of a mom who rides steel dinosaurs for a job.
As for the rhyming, no matter how many times I rewrite this manuscript, it always comes back to rhyming, it is DESTINED to be a bedtime book in rhyme.
My favorite stanza?
"Music helps Mama weave in magic,
like the moonlight through my dreams.
Each melody she sings aloud
hushes the growl of monster screams."
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