By PJ Parrish

Rejection bites.  Even 45 years after the fact.

I was cleaning out some old files the other day, searching for my portfolio of clips from my days working on my college newspaper The Eastern Echo. 

Didn’t find the clips but I found my first ever rejection letter from a publisher. It doesn’t have a date on it, but it had to be somewhere around 1980. That was back when I was trying to break into the romance novel business. I had a half-written manuscript and no clue what I was up against.

I decided to send it out to an agent. Guess who I picked? Mort Janklow. He was probably one of the top five literary agents in those days. His client list included Judith Krantz, Thomas Harris, Nancy Reagan and some guy living in The Vatican named John Paul.

I got a very nice letter back from him [his secretary], saying thank you but no thanks. So I decided, well, hell, who needs an agent? Why not go right to the publishers? I told you, I knew nothing back then.

So I sent my partial off to Dell Publishing. I don’t remember who I sent it to. And until the other day when I was cleaning, I didn’t remember exactly what their letter to me said. But here it is:

In case you can’t read it, here’s what it says. The bold-faced bracketed comments are mine.

Dear Sir or Ms. Montee,
We thank you for the opportunity [yeah, right!] to consider your proposal or manuscript. [what, they can’t figure out WHICH?]. We are sorry [I’ll bet] to inform you that the book does not seem a likely prospect [how elegant!] for the Dell Book list. Because we receive many individual submissions every day [you think I care how overworked you are?] it is impossible for us to offer individual comment [I’d say so since there is no human being attached to this letter to begin with] We thank you for thinking of Dell [insert sound of raspberry here] and we wish you the best of success [ie don’t darken our doorstep again with your crap] in placing your book with another publisher. [you’ll be sorry some day!]

Sincerely, [you’re kidding, right?]
The Editors [aka the evil Manhattan cabal trying to keep me unpublished]

I can laugh about the letter now. But it stung at the time, and in a way it still does. Because I remember how insignificant it made me feel at the time. (I didn’t realize how insignificant I actually was in the grand scheme of publishing). The impersonal-ness. The cop-out cliches. The fact that no one had the guts to even sign their name. But I kept this letter for some reason. Who knows why? My mom might know, because she always said that I never liked being told what to do. And these anonymous editors were telling me I couldn’t be a published writer.

(A year later, a different manuscript I had finished, was plucked out of the slush pile by an editor at Ballantine Books. They paid me $2,500. I was up and walking!)

Here’s the thing about rejection. It never stops. Even after you are published with a decent track record, you can still get dumped on. Four books into our Louis Kincaid series, my co-author sister Kelly and I decided we wanted to try our hand at a light mystery. We finished it, convinced we were the next Janet Evanovich, had our new pen name picked out and everything. But our agent couldn’t sell it. Not even to our own publisher. Which taught me a valuable lesson: It is not easy to write funny. I never tried that again.

Since I am retired now, I am sort of out of touch with the technical side of our business. Are query letters now done all by email? Does anyone even get paper rejection letters anymore? I kind of hope so, because tangible evidence of rejection can be a powerful motivator. Stephen King’s debut novel, Carrie, was rejected by nearly 30 publishers. He kept the rejection letters pinned to his wall, eventually replacing the nail with a spike.

Do rejection emails still come in the same code of yesteryear?

1. “This doesn’t fit my needs at this time.”
2. “Your writing is strong but I don’t feel I can be enthusiastic enough to fully get behind this project.”
3. “I’m afraid I will have to take a pass. But I am interested in seeing other projects…”

What they really mean:

1. You can’t write.
2. I already have four authors who write interplanetary romantasy.
3. Solar Punk rip-offs are yesterday’s news. Have you considered writing a horror-hardboiled mash-up?

I don’t mean to make light of your woes if you are going through this phase of rejection now. It’s not fun. But you will get through this. You will keep going. And with time, you’ll probably get a better perspective about it. Like I did.

The manuscript I sent to Dell was really, really bad. It was called The Last Rose of Summer, by the way. Go ahead, you can steal that title. The manuscript had no business going out in the world in the state it was in. I know, because I kept it. And yeah, It found it, too. It was actually physically painful to read it. But it reminds me that I learned a lot, and I came a long ways. This is a learning process. It still is. It always will be.

I read a good column by David Brooks the other day. He normally writes about politics, but he is often drawn into the side current of family or tribal dynamics. He asked a simple question in his column: Why do people do things that are hard?

Why do marathoners run almost to bodily ruin? Why endure the tedium of practicing the violin? Why does your curiosity compel you to explore the darkest cave despite your fears of going down there?

Why do we keep writing when we don’t even know if someone will ever read it?

Brooks believes it has something to do living in an “offensive spirit.” Meaning, you’re drawn by a positive attraction, not fear of failure. You see obstacles as challenges, not threats. “By the time you reach craftsman status,” he writes, “you don’t just love the product, you love the process, the tiny disciplines, the long hours, the remorseless work.”

I know that strikes a chord with some of you.

So, if you are feeling blue today, just know this one thing: You are not alone. Pearl Buck’s novel The Good Earth was rejected on the grounds that Americans were “not interested in anything on China.” A editor passed on George Orwell’s  Animal Farm, explaining it was “impossible to sell animal stories in the U.S.A.” And let’s not forget the agent who dumped Tony Hillerman and told him to “get rid of all that Indian stuff.”

And know that if you remain in an “offensive spirit,” you can prevail. I feel this way about gardening. And trying to become a really good cook. And playing the piano and pickleball. David Brooks ends his column by quoting the sculptor Henry Moore. So I will as well — because it rings true whether you are writing a book or learning how to make pasta from scratch:

“The secret to life is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of the day for your whole life. And the most important thing is — it must be something you cannot possibly do!”

Growing up, I lived in the Urbandale neighborhood of Old East Dallas, a post-war collection of neat little white frame houses that could have stood in for a television neighborhood like Leave It To Beaver, only with a different title.

Folks think I went to school in rural Lamar County, Texas, but I graduated from W.W. Samuell in Dallas’ Pleasant Grove, which is much different today. This misconception about my roots is because I tell everyone I lived on my grandparent’s farm in Chicota. We’re talking semantics here, but I mean this little scrawny, asthmatic kid existed in the city, but bloomed and experienced life in the country.

That doesn’t mean my experiences on the concrete streets weren’t valuable. I fought against the monicker of City Boy, and believe me, it wasn’t an easy thing to accomplish. We only lived there because the Old Man left the farm during the war and never returned after getting an assembly line job at Ford. He never wanted the gambling life of a farmer, always watching the market for cattle prices, or worried that enough rain would fall to sustain the cotton and corn crops they raised in those river bottoms in the 1960s.

So after school during the work/school week, I roamed the neighborhood with the other bike-riding outlaws who lived in our area. We did the usual, hung out in backyards, prowled the tame woods on the other side of the railroad tracks half a mile from our house, and organized pickup ball games at the school a block away (without adult interference and rules).

We kept the sidewalks hot running and riding back and forth between houses, and in the summer, they stayed that way all night from the heat of the sun. Summer in those days without air conditioning kept us outside, much to our parent’s delight. In the Texas heat, our bare feet toughened up to defy sizzling sidewalks, gravel, and even the street spiderweb patchwork of black, gooey hot tar in the concrete cracks that bubbled up and popped when we stepped on them.

Most folks in the neighborhood ignored us, as long as we stayed outside where we only came in after the streetlights came on. On Friday and Saturday nights we roamed even later, playing a made-up game of Run and Hide, our version of Hike and Seek, which involved hiding around every house, shrub, flowerbed, and driveway on our block.

We only had two old soreheads on our long block. One was Mrs. Grubbs, who lived in a on the corner up by the school and often stood on her tiny concrete porch to shout at us not to step on her grass when we made the 45-dgree turn on the sidewalk.

I think nothing grows today on that corner packed hard as concrete, where every kid in the neighborhood made sure to plant their foot just for spite.

The other sorehead was a case of mistaken identity, and I still regret it.

Sunbaked Mr. Pennington, who somehow misplaced his two front teeth at some point in his long life, talked with a soft whistling lisp through thin, loose lips that seemed to flap in the wind. He lived with his wife on the opposite end of our block. Each day he made his glacial, creaky walk down the sidewalk, using a heavy black cane to steady shaky knees.

I’d see him talking to the Old Man on occasion out under the big pecan tree in our front yard. I think Mr. Pennington like to stand there and blow for a minute, the old man’s euphonism for resting. It was an ancient reference to the days when Dad used mules to plow, and they’d rest in the shade for them to cool down and…blow.

When I was younger, I was always afraid of Mr. Pennington, mostly because his grizzled old wife who had a better mustache than mine, and only wore house dresses. She once scolded me when I rode my bike down the sidewalk and across the water hose she’d stretched to soak the parkway strip.

“Hey boy! Don’t run over that hose. Ride out in the street where you belong.”

Brother, that little outburst resulted in my mother-bear Mom roaring down there to “straighten that old $%@! out.” After that, Mom and Mrs. Pennington never spoke again, though they bared their teeth at each other when they passed on the street.

I didn’t pay the old man much attention when I was a kid. He was simply a fixture in our neighborhood, wearing work pants and shirts faded to a soft blue from thousands of washings and exposure to the sun on the clothesline in back.

As the years passed, more of his teeth disappeared and his hair turned snow white, what you could see under the John Deere cap he’d received somewhere around the time Eisenhauer was elected president.

The cap should have given me a clue.

I was home from college one day and sitting alone in the Old Man’s metal glider when Mr. Pennington crept by.

“Mind if I sit and blow a minute?” he asked.

I perked up at that comment and slid against the opposite arm. “Sure.”

“I always admired this shade.” He settled heavily onto the seat and leaned back, smelling of cigarettes and Old Spice. “It reminds me of one down in the Chicota bottoms when I was farming. I cooled off and took my dinner there when I could, and watered my mules of course.”

Shocked at the news, I probably gaped like a fish out of water. “You’re from Chicota?”

“Sure ‘nuff. Spent a lot of years walking behind them old mules, just like your daddy and grandaddy. I ain’t from around here.”

I couldn’t my ears. Here I was sitting next to still another fountain of information and stories, but in my mind growing up, he was just an old man walking past our house. I still wonder today how two men from that tiny little community would wind up on the same residential block 120 miles away.

For the next couple of years I got to know Mr. Pennington, and grew fond of the old farmer. I even forgave his wife for the water hose incident. Then one day he didn’t walk by and I learned he was walking a different, brighter trail where he didn’t need that cane, or his teeth, anymore.

I wish I’d sat at his knee a little earlier, and listened to what a quiet man had to say. His character, and those stories I missed would have inevitably found their way into my work. We spend too much time in our lives overlooking the world around us, while searching for unrecognizable opportunities we think we need.