Crystalee Calderwood, Children's Author

I’m a big fan of Mur Lafferty’s Podcast “I Should Be Writing.” I listen to it in bed or when I’m bored on a Sunday afternoon. Recently, she mentioned a blogger who is the self-imposed “Rejection Queen.”  This women freely puts rejection letters for her novel up on her blog, complete with the editors’ names.

You have got to be kidding me! The last thing a struggling writer needs to do is to burn bridges, and that’s exactly what she’s doing. It’s foolish to essentially make fun of an editor on your blog, because that editor will probably never consider your work ever again.

Recently, Rejection Queen has announced that she’s quit writing. I say thank goodness. She obviously didn’t have the drive or motivation for it. Her blog posts are full of whining about her rejections, and she never once mentions what she’s doing to make her novel better before throwing it back out into the world. In my opinion, she’s killed her career before it’s even begun.

I don’t consider myself a fantasy writer, but when I spotted Rebel Books’ Faerie Story Anthology for Young Adults on Duotrope, I knew I had to try it. The editors are looking for “modern, original stories about or including faeries with an edgy teen focus.”

At first, I wasn’t sure what “edgy” meant to them. Was I supposed to write about drugs, sex and rock n’ roll? Maybe just sex? Was the main character supposed to be a fairy or a teenager or both? How do teens perceive fairy stories, anyway? How do you make fairies “edgy”?

I’ve never published anything for teens before, although I have written three young adult novels that are currently in various stages of revision. I’ve read enough young adult novels that I’m fairly sure I can write about teens with some success. So, did I succeed on my fairy story for teens? I won’t know until the acceptance or rejection letter comes in. I do know that it wasn’t easy to write; it took me multiple revisions and read-throughs by members of my writing group to get me confident enough to submit it.

Now the waiting game happens. I’m so excited about this story that I’m getting antsy after three days. Time to start thinking about another story. And this one involves elves.

Many readers have a genre they would not be caught dead reading. Some have a prejudice against Erotica, or don’t understand Sci-Fi. Others consider Literary Fiction boring or cringe at Romance novels. I consider myself pretty open to anything, but I have one aversion: vampires.

Just today I read my very first vampire story ever, as a review favor for a friend who is preparing to submit it to an anthology. It was a well-written story (his stuff usually is, and he has a fantastic publication record to prove it), but I just couldn’t get over the fact that I was reading about a female blood-sucking vampire. I’ve always had this feeling (despite never reading one) that vampire stories were cheesy and uninteresting. With the success of Twilight, and all of the subsequent vampire books aimed at a teen market, you may be thinking that I’ve finally decided to give them a try. Maybe I’ll even write one myself, get a best seller for sure?

Not a chance. The success of Twilight has only made me avoid vampires even more. I’m not one to jump on the trend bandwagon; I only recently started reading the Harry Potter series because when they first came out, I refused to follow the crowd. I was sure that “popular” didn’t necessarily equal “well-written, high-quality, engaging storyline.” Well, I was wrong about that one, but I’m pretty sure I’m not wrong about Twilight. Nothing about the series interests me, not even the studly sparkling vampire.

We as writers need to make the trends, not follow them. Stephanie Meyers created the vampire teen novel trend with Twilight. Who knows how long that will last before the next big thing comes along? There are probably a thousand authors out there writing vampire novels, and by time they’re complete, the trend will have died down and no publisher will be interested in them anymore. I’m not about to have a dead vampire novel sitting on my desk.

For those of us who want to experiment with vampires or werewolves or Sci Fi or any other genre one can think of, there are still a gazillion anthologies and journals out there looking for such things. We’re free to experiment in any genre we want and will probably find someone to publish it. We may even make a little money off it. We’ll never be Stephanie Meyers, but does the world need another Stephanie Meyers? No, I think the world needs ME and YOU and our individuality.