Overcoming the inertia of disappointment

I got a rejection every day for the first four days of the month. And then resounding silence for a few days. I'll admit, it shook my confidence. As much as I love to write, the business of writing can be a soul-sucking endeavor. Yesterday I struggled to do the work. I took myself out of the house to do a revision sweep on a story a friend was kind enough to beta-read, got home and wasted time online for a couple hours before finally getting to the rough draft work I'd committed to doing every day.

The whole time I kept thinking, This is one of the hard days, but if I keep working good things will happen. Maybe the universe will see how hard I'm trying and how much my heart hurts and I'll be rewarded!

So I was all, *Another* rejection? 

Or, you know, maybe once the work's all done, I'll get another rejection. Which is what actually happened, because the universe does not want me to be happy ever again.

So yesterday evening I wallowed and was bitchy. This morning, I decided that was not an acceptable lifestyle choice in the longer term, so I put together a list of markets I wanted to send poems to, and checked to see which ones were open, and what they might want.

And I sent out a bunch of stuff. I'm still cranky because honestly, rejections are never awesome. But I've been caught before in the inertia of disappointment, where a few rejection letters lead to months of sitting on all the new material I've written, or not bothering to revise stuff because that's the hard part, and all that effort seems pointless.

Which is not to say that I'm suddenly immune to the inertia of disappointment. Just that, today, even though the universe doesn't want me to win, I'm not going to sit quietly and take it. Not today.