Here’s an interesting phenomenon I’ve encountered lately. People expressing concern because I am nearing completion of my novel “A Time and a Place”. They’re concerned because I’ve obviously invested so much time and energy into this project — the genesis of the novel was more than twenty years ago (though I’ve only been working on it in earnest for about four years).

So my friends and family are concerned that when it is inevitably rejected (brutally, repeatedly), the rejection will CRUSH me.

I’ll be disappointed, sure. But here’s the thing. Several things, actually.

1. I have a day job, a good one, and I’m reasonably good at it, or at least deluded enough to think that I am. I earn my living with it. So there’s a bit of self-esteem happening there.

2. As I mentioned in an earlier post, Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War was rejected about eight times before St. Martin’s Press picked it up (okay, Analog serialized it first, but still). Donaldson submitted his Covenant series forty or fifty times before it was picked up. Ursula K. Le Guin received crazy (in retrospect) rejection letters for The Left Hand of Darkness (you owe it to yourself to click on that link if you haven’t already… come back though y’all, ya hear?). So even if A Time and a Place is rejected, I will just keep submitting it. The Forever Submission, the process will eventually be called.

3. Internal Values versus External Values. This one’s the most important of all, so pay strict attention. I do not derive my self-worth from what other people think of me or my work. I derive it from ME. You can reject my manuscript, all my hard work, but you are not rejecting ME. Only I can reject me. And I don’t.

4. The pleasure derived from my novel comes from the writing of the novel. Countless hours of pleasure writing it, thinking about it, crafting it, editing it. I will derive some fleeting pleasure from publishing the novel if that ever happens. I will derive some fleeting pleasure from any positive response to the novel. But mostly I’ll be satisfied just to have finished it, and finished it well (which is why it’s taking so long, by the way… that and the fact that I have a life, a family, a job, obligations, responsibilities etc… and I’m just not selfish enough to place myself or my novel first)

Incidentally, because I’m an optimist I thought I would have the novel done by now. In my bio for Worldcon I wrote that it was done, and that I was hard at work on my second novel, Captain’s Away! (the title includes an exclamation mark, in case you thought I was just getting all excited there). Honestly, I probably have about eight more months work to do on A Time and a Place. Sixty to eighty pages left to revise, and that’s how long it will take me, eeking out a bit of time here, a bit of time there (got half an hour in this morning, enough to revise about a paragraph).

A true professional (say, Mike Resnick, famous for his hard-nosed approach to the business) might deride this approach, and certainly were I looking to write full time and make a decent living at it this approach would not work. But that is not my plan. Someday, maybe. For today, I write when I can, while living the life I have as best I can.

Another time, another place, maybe things will be different…