Reviewer Joel Samberg: Joel is an author, book editor, journalist, and corporate communications consultant with more than forty years of experience. He has written for Connecticut Magazine, Pittsburgh Magazine, New Jersey Monthly and dozens of others, and his nonfiction books have been on such topics as music, movies, and comedy. He is also the author of the 2019 novel, Blowin' in the Wind. You can learn more about Joel’s books and book editing service:You can learn more about Joel Here and Here.
During a Pandemic, Can Rejection Notices Come in Handy?
As a writer, I was sheltering in place long before it became mandatory. It is from my home-office where I work on my books, edit fiction and nonfiction by other people, write magazine articles and reviews of newly published works, and try to develop what I hope might be a brilliant literary idea or two somewhere along the line.
During a Pandemic, Can Rejection Notices Come in Handy?
As a writer, I was sheltering in place long before it became mandatory. It is from my home-office where I work on my books, edit fiction and nonfiction by other people, write magazine articles and reviews of newly published works, and try to develop what I hope might be a brilliant literary idea or two somewhere along the line.
I don’t ever have to leave home if I don’t want to.
But that doesn't mean that life is the same for me now than it was before the pandemic. It’s not. Nor is it for my wife. For her, the change is even more severe. She used to teach cake and cupcake decorating classes from our home, but she couldn’t do that all through 2020 and may not be able to do it for several more months to come.
But then there are the everyday-domestic-living kinds of changes. You know the ones I mean. Eating, for example. And using the lavatory.
For one thing, we’ve been eating at home a lot more since restaurant dining became inaccessible. For another, we’ve been using more water than before because of all the plates and silverware we use (thanks to not being able to go to restaurants). In fact, we used so much of it one day that the well which supplies our water ran dry. We were unable to use the sink or run the dishwasher.
And speaking of running dry, we were as concerned as everyone else about the toilet paper situation. Would the day come when we’d be left without a single roll?
Here’s where I thought that being a writer might come in handy for issues like these.
One of the byproducts of my trade is a healthy collection of rejection notices from book publishers, magazine editors, and literary agents. For every project that actually sees the light of day, there are several others that must languish in a desk drawer, probably forever. That's just the way it goes. It’s part of the writer’s life.
I’ve been saving my rejection notices as a sort of collective badge of resilience and survival. A testament to never-give-up-ism, which is an important trait for all writers to have.
On the other hand, rejection notices take up a lot of space, and sometimes they make me want to scream, particularly when they’re poorly written or clearly indicate that what’s being rejected wasn’t even read by an actual human being.
So here’s what I considered doing.
To conserve water, my wife and I would forgo real plates and use rejection notices instead. I’d put three or four of them on top of one another, and crinkle up all four sides to create an effective food border. That way, my wife and I could just throw out our rejection notice paper plates (since we didn’t want to go out to buy real paper plates) and completely eliminate the need to use the sink or the dishwasher.
As for lavatory, I considered salvaging empty cardboard toilet paper rolls, tape together several rejection notices end to end, and then spin them round and round the cardboard roll. Voila! Instant toilet paper!
Ultimately, I suppose this may be more a statement on what I feel about rejection notices than it is a practical solution, because I don't know just how practical it would be. They’d undoubtedly clog up the toilet. And then it would be just another brilliant idea flushed away into the annals of rejection.