Day Five: Rejections and Magazines

The four "Carte Postale" images I submitted today to Somerset's Digital Studio magazine.

In my attempt to receive 100 rejections in 100 days, a good question to ask might be: "Why strive, specifically, for rejection?" Wouldn't it make more sense to work for "yes's" rather than "no's"?

Here's what it comes down to: what I am the most afraid of is rejection. Of someone telling me that my work--my art--isn't good enough for them. And while I can rationalize it all I want and say things like, "maybe it wasn't a great fit", or" it wasn't great timing," it still sucks.

But after a while, to paraphrase Indie Retail's article "Becoming Resilient; Or, What to Do When You Get Eaten by a Crocodile," the more you fall down, the less it starts to hurt. And that, in many ways, is my goal. That at the end of 100 days or 100 rejections, sending out submissions and requests and solicitations will be easy....or at least not scary...and the no's won't hurt quite as much or be taken as personally. And doesn't that sound lovely?

Now on to today's submission....

Day #5: I've often dreamed of being in a Somerset Publication, especially their relatively new Digital Studio. But here's what normally happens. I get all excited for whatever reason about submitting my artwork. The I go off to check their submission deadlines and realize I'm two weeks late for the last one and the next one isn't for six months. Then I forget for another six months and the same exact thing happens. Wash and repeat. So guess what happened when I decided that today was the day to finally hit "send" to the magazine editor? Yep, the deadline was October 15th. But this time instead of following my usual pattern I decided to just go for it and ask her to either squeeze me in or consider it a reaaallly early submission for the October 2013 edition. Kind of excited about this one.

My First Response! Several people have asked for the name of the "business coach" I referred to in another post. Right now I'm in my last week of an amazing class called "Foundations II" at Mercy Corps Northwest, which is co-taught by Bill Horton and Randhi Wilson. Beyond the group setting I feel I would really benefit from having some one-to-one business coaching, especially in terms of long-term direction setting for piddix. So I sent Bill an email last week to see if we could get together and see whether this might be a good fit and he got back to me today to set up a time to talk. No, not the scariest connection I've made since I've already been learning from him (and in this case, I'd be paying him, not the other way around). But it's still something I might not normally have done had I not had a bit of extra motivation.

For more information on what in the world I'm doing, click here to read all about my attempts to receive 100 rejections in 100 days.