My name is Daniella Levy and I’m a writer and highly experienced rejectee.
I started this blog from a place of exasperation and despair mixed with incredulity at my own stubbornness. When I wrote my introductory post, I had been trying, and failing, to get my fiction published for some-odd 15 years. I’d self-published a nonfiction book, Letters to Josep: An Introduction to Judaism, and had a few articles and poems published here and there; but my true passion was fiction, and despite some positive and encouraging feedback from the agents and magazines I was submitting to, every time, the answer was ultimately no. I’m talking hundreds of rejections.
And yet, for reasons I couldn’t entirely understand, I kept plugging away at those submissions. I felt like the proverbial crazy person who keeps doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.
I wondered what it was that kept me at it, that gave me the resolve to keep going even when I continued to fail so consistently.
I started this blog with two goals: to challenge the flawed common wisdoms about coping with rejection; and to offer some alternative strategies, based on an exploration of what it was that had made me so resilient to rejection all these years.
But here’s the really crazy thing.
Exactly one month and 4 days after that first post went up, I got my very first acceptance.
And it was followed by another. And another. And another, and another… including, at very, very long last, an acceptance from a small press to publish my novel, By Light of Hidden Candles.
I hope this blog gives you some coping tools, some laughs, and some food for thought; but most of all, what I hope it gives you is hope.
Because if there is anything I’ve learned on this exhausting journey, it’s that hope is the key to moving forward, onward, and upward.
You can learn more about me, my writing, and all the other random things I do on my author website.