2008 CWIM Excerpt: Candie Moonshower on Dealing with Rejection...

In the 2008 CWIM, author Candie Moonshower (The Legend of Zoey) offers 10 (giant but essential) steps for writing and publishing your first novel. Here's her advice on handling an important step every writer must take: learning to handle rejection.

Part and parcel of the writing biz are the rejections. You will get them. In fact, you need to get them! Because after you've received a few rejections, it dawns on you that rejections aren't personal.

Instead of looking at rejections as overwhelming obstacles, try to view them as part of your development as a professional writer. New writers aren't the only ones who receive rejections. Published authors submit manuscripts that garner rejections, too. If you never submit out of fear of rejection, you'll never allow an editor the opportunity to call you with an offer!

Learn to deal with rejections by:

• Not submitting manuscripts too early. Like fine wine, your manuscript isn't ready until it has been written, rewritten, critiqued, revised and polished. When you send in work that isn't ready for an editorial look-see, you're cheating yourself by knocking that editor off your list of possibilities.
• Replacing worry with work. My mother always says that it's hard to worry when you're scrubbing a floor. I find it hard to worry about rejections when I have another manuscript ready to send out the door.
• Starting on a new project as soon as your manuscript has left the building (again, you're replacing worry with work). Always have a new, exciting project going that will take your mind off your mailbox.
• Never whining, ranting or crying about rejections except to your most trusted writing friends and, perhaps, your spouse. You, especially, never want to complain about rejections to those agents or editors who, potentially, might have one of your manuscripts in their hands someday.

For Moonshower's complete article, see the 2008 CWIM (page 25).