I wended my way through the web and eventually found myself reading this blog, Thirteen Things. You can do to rejection letters. I had a good laugh at the list. Not only was it creative, it was very satisfying. So much of what we do as writers requires us to refrain from doing things. We have to take a lot of abuse on the chin. My daughter gave me a tee shirt for Christmas that reads: Put in your big girl panties and deal with it. I'm sure there wasn't a personal message in that. It pretty much sums up the writer's life, don't you think? We have to smile politely when someone tells us why their book would be so much better than ours, if they only had the time to write it and listen to people who are happy to "give" you their idea for a book and in exchange they will "let" us share in the massive profits that are sure to follow publication.
We have to thank reviewers, even when they don't get what we wrote and didn't like it. We have to grin and bear less than wonderful amazon reader reviews. We send our stuff out with hope in our hearts and figure out how to deal with it when it comes zipping back so fast, we're sure it didn't even get read, which it probably didn't! One really nice thing that has come out of the internet is a place to find out we're not alone. I like to read Paperback Writer's blog. Today he's talking about putting warning labels on our books, but wouldn't it also be fun to put warning labels on US? Warning, sharing ideas could result in explosive decompression of author. Telling this author you don't have time to write a book could be a choking hazard.