Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Rejection is like eating your vegetables. Your angry, dismissive, psychotic vegetables.

Your piece stinks. We fed it to the turtle. --David Holahan

I get rejected a lot, but not nearly as often as I should. If I really wanted to make it big, I'd be going around getting rejected at least once a week. Instead, I've been on the rejection wagon this year. I've been hiding in my apartment, not sending anything out, and not, God forbid, making appointments and walking places with my portfolio. My portfolio is dusty.

So this blog is going to knock me off the wagon, or get me back on the horse, or do some other antiquated, travel-related metaphor to me. Everything is either a good time or a good story, right?

The sad thing is, I haven't entirely avoided rejection this year. There have been little farts of it from some very small potatoes places. I hate small potatoes.

For example, an online business that accepts t-shirt design submissions rejected my submission of a high-contrast face as 'needing more work.' This from an organization that is actively marketing a t-shirt that features a rainbow-colored Native-American head in full feather headdress on a teal background. In the parlance of our times, WTF?

Turns out it's better to be rejected by the big boys.

So, in this blog I'll to catalog my encounters with the gallery and publishing worlds instead. No more t-shirt companies. Only Ahhht. As my friend in Chicago says, 'you gotta go balls out!' (She was talking about applying for apartments, but what the heck)

Soon you'll be reading about galleries like Waspylastname&Waspylastname. (On the extremely slim chance that anyone in Chelsea actually reads this thing all names will be changed) Each week there will also be an open call for 'rejection of the week.' Send me your stories and I'll post them here.

3 comments:

  1. This is fantastic! I'll be drumming up some stories. I got rejected by the NEA, but it wasn't nearly as dramatic or horrible as I'd hoped.

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  2. You mean I'm not alone?

    This is great. I look forward to the shared misery and will try to dig up a few of my own stories.

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  3. great idea! i'll need to think about how best to tabulate all my rejections...maybe a sort of bar graph for each film/script...# of rejections vs. # screenings...stuff like that...i've had people tell me to my face "NO" too...of course i walked in cold to a distributor's office with a vhs tape...and i wasn't planning on leaving w/it...okay, will think of something to contribute soon.

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