I talked with a couple of colleagues yesterday and I noticed a common theme among our discussions. The trepidation and anxiety that can be part and parcel of the entertainment business in general. Sometimes the stakes are really big (book proposals, movie options, licensing deals) and sometimes they are somewhat mundane (normal short story submissions), but it seems like a lot of us share a common experience while awaiting word.
We beat ourselves up a little over the quality of the work under consideration when it’s no longer within our control to make it any better. We expect to be rejected. We express frustration when we don’t get word back as quickly as we’d like. We worry about what the response, when it finally comes, will be.
And then comes the day when the response does come, and we turn into basket cases. The letter or e-mail looms before us and suddenly all our insecurities blossom. Our previous impatience does a disappearing act and we now wish the response wasn’t sitting there, just waiting for us to open it. We malinger and procrastinate, find other things to do instead of opening the envelope or clicking on the e-mail message link.
Finally we summon the courage to open the message and unleash the verdict. But it doesn’t get any easier. It’s like we go back to square one with each new submission or proposal. At least we’re getting a good aerobic work out. The whole pounding heart thing.
I’m still revising Missing Persons, though I didn’t get a lot of work done this morning. I’m in a scene that’s a bit overlong and also has to be rewritten to be from a different character’s point of view, so it’s not exactly smooth sailing. This is the first appearance of this character in the book, so I need to make sure that she is well introduced from her own perspective, and then make sure that I clear up any places subsequently in the manuscript where I do the same thing. It’s a bit of delicate surgery and I have to make sure I don’t leave any sponges or scalpels in the patient when I suture her back up.
Writers are a cowardly and superstitious lot.
No, wait, that’s criminals.
Well, replace “cowardly” with “anxiety-prone” and it maybe works.
I have a similar experience with my bills as well.
so true!
While I don’t know about the writing end of things, being a creative artist, and in marketing, I DO understand about being on the edge of each submission for catalog concepts and ideas. And when they finally are approved, that is when the REAL work begins. It is interesting to hear this from a different angle of the creative world. Thanks for sharing.
That’s why we all dress as bats.
So … I’m a basket case … but at least I’m not alone? Fair ’nuff!
– C.
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