eye of the tiger

Waking up to the perpetual silence of my phone is rough, but waking up to two rejection emails is worse.

And that pretty much sums up my day. I'm going to try to avoid chronicling the pain here, not because I'm worried about boring you (if you're still here after seven years, you've tacitly accepted my idiosyncrasies), but because it's generally not a good idea to blog publicly about such things. And, I'm not sure that blogging about it would be particularly helpful anyway. So, I'll try to stop complaining about the phone not ringing, and may not share future rejections until we have a definitive answer on whether we've sold or come to the end of the road. Sorry, kids.

After getting the emails from my agent (including her attempt to cheer me up with continued optimism for our prospects), I promptly told Alyssa that I wasn't coming in to the gym, pulled the covers over my head, and went back to bed. It was the only thing I could think to do, but I eventually rallied, got up, and made myself some breakfast. Eating bacon certainly improved my mood, if only briefly, and so I took care of some stuff that I needed to get done. Sometime around two p.m., I ventured into downtown Palo Alto and had a late lunch, then took Alyssa's advice and hiked the Dish. Being outside certainly helped to clear my head a little bit, as did the nap that I took when I got back to my house. Then I showered, made a peanut butter sandwich for dinner, and read half of a book on my kindle. And now, I need to go to bed -- I'm training with Alyssa tomorrow, and I don't intend to skip this one.

The last thing I will say, though, is that the only positive outcome that I felt in the minutes after those rejections was the clarity that I'm willing to sacrifice anything to be a writer. Maybe that's not a positive; some of my lunch friends yesterday already said that the movie "Black Swan" reminded them of me (I haven't seen it, but I'm assuming that's not a compliment). But my first instinct wasn't to stop writing -- it was to identify what I have to change/allow/give up in order to make this dream happen. It's still too early and I'm still too raw to think in terms of battle plans, but that day will come. And that kernel of clarity will have to be the basis of all the tough decisions I have to make down the road.