End of the road?
Ever felt the vile emotional fix when your 'masterpiece' manuscript has been rejected? The pain that comes of it is often inexplicable. Muddled in emotional fury, incomprehensible to even the most serene feelings, you feel like the world has drowned on you and society has rejected you.
Rejection of a manuscript does not mean the work is condemned as worthless or a sham had it been let to go off the press. No. The emotional attachment is just too strong to make you think so.
Ever wished to confide your most pressing feelings to someone and (s)he refused to listen! That is how you feel when you receive that notification, 'We regret we are unable to consider publishing your manuscript... and some other bitter words thrown in here and there. More often, the manuscript is rejected without formal rejection slips or suggestion on how you could improve your work.
What a damn backward step!
Different publishers espouse specific genres which they would be more willing to assess and luckily for the up-coming author, consider it for publication, subject to the given corrections, which you will have to live up to.
Once the manuscript has been rejected, the author, just like the proverbial hunchback animal struggling to ascend a sharp hill, feels they have been consigned to the bondage of rejection. The bitter-sweet words that follow the rejection lines, 'good luck,' 'wish you the best in your publishing endeavours,' 'try other publishers' seem like an addition of a lethal insult to a wound. It's one of the never-ending miseries that cripple the poor chap, trying to struggle out of obscurity by having their masterpiece(s) published. Woe unto them, even celebrated witers like Chinua Achebe and V. S Naipaul and some of their ilk, had to wait a little longer, before their books could be published.
Joshua Masinde
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