Debbie Ridpath Ohi's Blog, page 193

Cartoon Caption #5 Winner: Guy Thomas Wade

Winner of the most recent Cartoon Caption Contest was Guy Thomas Wade. Congrats, Guy!

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Yasmine Galenorn: 600 rejections before her first book contract

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Yasmine Galenorn (@YasmineGalenorn on Twitter) says that she had 600 rejections piled up before she received her first book contract, including rejections from short stories, poetry, and novels. Her first eight contracts were for nonfiction, and she still has seven novels in the closet (”and they’ll stay there!”).

Now New York Times bestselling author Yasmine Galenorn writes the bestselling urban fantasy Otherworld/Sisters of the Moon series for Berkley and the upcoming Indigo Court Series (also

James Patterson: first novel rejected 26 times

James Patterson’s first novel, The Thomas Berryman Number, was rejected 26 times before finally being accepted by Little, Brown in 1976. One publisher held it for seven months (which made him hopeful) before turning it down.

The book went on win the Edgar Award for the best first mystery novel.
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Patterson now holds the New York Times bestsellers list record with 39 New York Times bestselling titles overall and has sold more than 150 million books worldwide. He’s the only author to occupy the #1 sl

Will Write For Chocolate: Mimi discovers Twitter

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Speaking of Twitter, I’m @inkyelbows.

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Ursula K. Le Guin was told that “The Left Hand Of Darkness” was “unreadable”

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Ursula K. Le Guin wrote after the children went to bed and (when they got older) during their school hours, but it took many years before her work found acceptance.

Le Guin’s early stories were rejected because editors found them a challenge to categorize. From an NNDB.com bio:

Although editors were routinely praising the quality of her writing, they also found her stories difficult to pigeonhole. Typically they were rejected as not being “quite right” for the style or genre of a particular magazi

ProgPress: Wordpress plugin for wordcount tracking

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So I’ve decided to switch to ProgPress by Jason Penny as my Wordpress plugin (see my right-hand navigation bar, partway down the page) because I can list multiple writing projects within the same widget.

I avoided the plugin at first because (at first glance, at least), it looked more complicated than the other choices, plus the user documentation needs a bit of help. However, I like the flexibility and customization possibilities of this app. Here’s a quickie tutorial on how you can use it for y

William Golding’s “Lord Of The Flies” rejected 20 times

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20 publishers rejected William Golding’s Lord of the Flies before the book found a home at Faber & Faber and was published in 1954. Quote from one publisher’s rejection letter:

…an absurd and uninteresting fantasy which was rubbish and dull.

Initially, Lord of the Flies was rejected from the reading pile at Faber & Faber, but was championed by editor Charles Monteith. When it was first published, it didn’t sell well. From Monteith:

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The book began not only to be talked about but to sell and before

Chicken Soup For The Soul authors: rejected 134 times

When Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen started shopping around their Chicken Soup book idea, they were rejected 134 times (”and here we are 100 million books later”), including rejections from twenty major publishers.

Now, total retail sales of Chicken Soup for the Soul branded merchandise reached over $1.3 billion, top media brands like King Features (stories in 77 newspapers—daily), Woman’s World (stories to 1.6 million subscribers—weekly), BeliefNet (stories to 770,000 subscribers—daily) an

A.C. Crispin: 6 ways to increase your writing productivity

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A.C. Crispin wrote a great post on productivity and writing in Writer Beware a few years back, well worth reading. Basically her tips are:

1. Write something EVERY DAY.

2. NEVER end your writing for the day by completing a scene or a chapter.

3. When you’re feeling unsure about what to do next, RE-READ and EDIT.

4. If you’re genuinely blocked, delete the last five pages of your story and then rewrite them, polishing and editing as you go.

5. Review your synopsis.

6. Go elsewhere to write (coffeeshop,

The Scream (of writer rejection)

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