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Category: writing

One Hundred Rejections

Published by Kelly on October 12, 2025

Winning this year’s Writer’s League of Texas manuscript contest has been exciting, to be sure, but I’ve also had to temper my excitement by remembering 2023. That year, I entered the contest in the romance category with my almost-completed novel Don’t Give Me Grief, which was listed as a finalist in the contest.

I thought to myself, this is amazing! Here I am going into the market to query in a wildly popular genre with a manuscript that earned an award before it was even finished. This was going to be SO easy! I even had an agent (who I met via the WLT Agent Symposium) express interest in seeing the whole thing when I was done, and told me to send it to her when I was. She was the first agent I queried back in November of 2023.

Fast forward nearly two years, and that manuscript has now garnered its 100th rejection in the market. It’s had its share of interest, with a full manuscript request from two agents and three different small presses, but it was ultimately a pass on all of them. The refrain, when it doesn’t come in a boilerplate form rejection, is that it’s very hard to stand out in the market right now. Yes, contemporary romance and romantic comedy are popular, but only among the authors who are already standing out in that crowded space.

So what do you do when your manuscript fails to land and amasses its 100th rejection?

You write another one. You keep querying. Go for 200 – why not? Every no is just one step closer to a yes. All the other platitudes. It’s hard to not take the rejection personally and keep going, I won’t pretend it isn’t. Every time I opened a followup email after sending a full manuscript I was SURE was going to be an acceptance, I was disappointed to the point of tears. But I kept going. I’m going to keep going.

And I’m going to write the last 20k-30k words in the novel that won in the thriller category of this year’s manuscript contest, so I can repeat the same delusion about this one’s query journey being a piece of cake.

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A discourse on discipline

Published by Kelly on November 24, 2024

TL;DR – it’s been a shitty year but now I am writing a new book.

Oldest child and rule follower that I am, self-motivation and self-discipline have typically not been an issue for me. This year, however, has been a very notable exception. Going into 2024, I was writing consistently, had a thrice-weekly gym class routine I rarely strayed from, and was consistently querying agents and publishers for my latest completed manuscript.

Then in late January, I started experiencing tailbone pain, which led me into a medical mystery I wish were fiction, and not something I’m still living with 10 months later. It’s a long story and I’m still writing about it, but what it meant for me was that the discipline of writing became all but impossible. My entire adult life, I have always done my writing at night, especially after my twins were born, because between kids and a full-time job, it was the only time I had.

The year crawled by, with much of it spent waiting for surgery and very little writing. I finished a couple poems and a couple short stories (and got one published – yay!) but told myself it wasn’t worth starting a new novel until I had dedicated writing time where I could sit every day without pain. When surgery and recovery came and went, and I was still experiencing pain, I felt like I might as well just give up.

There’s a bookstore I love in Bastrop, TX called The Painted Porch. It’s owned by Ryan Holiday, a guy who’s made a career out of studying and espousing Stoic philosophy. I’m not a big non-fiction reader, and even less of a self-help reader, but I stumbled across Ryan Holiday’s books on my library’s Libby app and decided to check one out because A) all my holds were still showing a nice long wait B) I love The Painted Porch and C) because I enjoyed Philosophy 101 enough to learn more about the Stoics.

The book I checked out was called Discipline is Destiny, and I’m not exaggerating when I say that this sort-of-self-help book drawing on principles of Stoic philosophy changed my life. Holiday hooked me immediately with the “clean your desk” message as the very cluttered desk where I used to write (before my year of pain) stared back at me. I expected to hear about the discipline of the most famous Stoic philosophers and elite athletes (and I did), but did not expect to hear about the discipline behind two of my literary heroes – Toni Morrison and Joyce Carol Oates – who got up early every morning to write before they went to their day jobs and took care of their children.

Y’all, it never even OCCURRED to me that instead of waiting until I was pain-free and energetic enough to write in the evening after I got my kids off to bed, I could just get up early and write in the morning when my mind and my body were fresh instead. It sounds crazy now that I needed a book to tell me that, but it’s a testament to just how rigid we can get in our thinking and our daily routines that we keep doing the same thing even when it’s not working for us – a trap I fall into more often than I’d like. But as I recently learned, it’s a core tenet of Stoic philosophy: we can’t control our circumstances, but it’s our duty to control how we respond to them.

My getting back to discipline is still a work in progress. Faced with the prospect of getting up to write or getting an extra hour of sleep, there are still mornings where sleep wins. And sometimes I will sit and stare at the screen for a good 8 minutes before writing a single word. Some mornings I only manage to write a handful of sentences. But I’m doing the work, doing my best to avoid the snooze button, and I’m now closing in on the 3rd chapter of a new novel because of it. Discipline is a practice, and the more I do it, the better I am at it… especially with a clean desk.

Maybe there’s something to this self-help genre after all… but I’d still rather read ghost stories.

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I’m in my book friends era

I’m in my book friends era

Published by Kelly on February 11, 2024
Photo credit: Zibby Media
Photo credit: Zibby Media
Photo credit: Zibby Media

Happy Super Bowl Sunday, Taylor Swift in Japan Day, and International Day of Women and Girls in Science (however you celebrate – I don’t judge).

I’ve devoted far more brain matter than is appropriate to thinking about how much changed for me between 2022’s Texas Book Festival and 2023’s (back in November). In 2022, my latest book had just come out a few months prior, and while it was still having its moment in the sun, I didn’t feel like I was. I barely knew anyone in the local book scene, and I was only able to get a launch party at the same bookstore that had had me a decade before, when I was brand new to Austin.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful to BookWoman for having me, but walking between the booths at the last TX Book Fest, it struck me how different of a place I was in. My book had gotten a modest number of good local reviews and I had inched my way into the local circle by showing up at events and forcing myself to talk to people (and buying their books… lots of them… I need shelf help). Instead of gawking at the lineup of authors and cautiously approaching booksellers, I was waving to them and chatting them up like old friends, because that’s what we’d become over the past year since my book came out – friends.

For most of the last eight years, I realized I’d been in my “mom friends” era. So much of my social life revolved around my kids (and let’s be real… a lot of it still does) and being on the board of Austin Parents of Multiples that those were the only circles I was regularly in. Not that I was particularly adept at making mom friends – it took a lot of awkward minivan and Costco talk at windowless room birthday parties to find my people. Before the twins started Kindergarten, I was squarely in a niche mom friends era in which I rarely interacted with any parents who didn’t own a double stroller.

Before that, it was the “college friends” era. Instead of pizza and cake and Urban Air birthday parties every weekend, it was weddings and bachelorette parties and housewarmings. I mostly dodged the bridesmaid bullet, largely due to avoiding the whole sorority thing. I somehow found time to hang out with my now-husband in sports bars between working full time and doing the world’s weirdest freelance writing gigs. (Okay now I know how – I didn’t have two tiny humans who relied on me to feed them and bathe them and put them to bed when I would normally be in a sports bar).

But NOW… my kids are older and a increasingly more self-reliant. I have a sliver of life outside of school pickup and twin stroller walks where we take up the sidewalk AND the bike lane. Are all my pants still Costco pants? Yes – because Costco is the best and waistbands are the wort. But most of my t-shirt repertoire is now bookstore and book festival finds.

This past weekend, I attended a much-needed Zibby Books Retreat after convincing myself A) It was an appropriate use of my Indie Author Project prize money (see previous blog post) and B) I had enough solo-attended book events under my belt that I wouldn’t feel too out of my element talking about books with a group of 60 strangers. We weren’t strangers for long. There’s something about a mutual love for books that instantly bonded me to these new book friends, and made me feel like I was my own person outside of my husband and kids. They also appreciated my strong bookstore t-shirt and Costco pants game.

Of course, I still have some long-lasting friendships from my college friends era. I still camp once a year with my twin mom era friends. I went to dinner and a show with my kids’ best friend’s mom last night. They are still my people. But when my next book comes out (TBD… don’t ask), I won’t be the outsider at the Texas Book Festival anymore. I’ll be surrounded by the book friends I’ve made and am still making in my book friends era, because they are now my people, too.

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I’m in an anthology! And it’s pub day!

I’m in an anthology! And it’s pub day!

Published by Kelly on June 29, 2022

Today is pub day for my second book this summer… sort of. I didn’t plan on this coming out just a week after my novel, but it happened just that way. Art in the Time of Unbearable Crisis is an anthology about just that, how we create art and deal in the midst of a crisis. Some people chose, naturally, to write about COVID, social justice issues, or climate change. My piece is about our experience in the 2021 Texas winter storm (it’s toward the end of the book).

It’s probably the most political thing I’ve written publicly, but it’s not about politics (and neither am I). It’s about being decent to people in the face of political differences. It applied to the situation then, and it still applies in light of recent political developments, which I need not enumerate here. We are all better when we greet each other with empathy and acknowledge that everyone’s just an imperfect human trying to do their best. The internet has made it too easy to forget the humanity of those we disagree with.

She Writes Press will donate all royalties earned on this book to World Central Kitchens, a non-profit that feeds victims of natural disaster and war (most recently in Ukraine). The book is available for purchase everywhere books are sold, but I of course recommend getting it on Bookshop where you can support your local independent bookstore!

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It only takes one rejection…

It only takes one rejection…

Published by Kelly on December 10, 2021

Writers deal with a lot of rejection. Years, sometimes decades of rejection. And when they discouraged, their fellow rejectees bolster them up with the same refrain: It only takes one yes.

Sadly, the inverse is also true. It only takes one stinging rejection for all the impostor syndrome to creep back in. I’m lucky in that while I’ve had my fair share of manuscript rejections in the past year, I’ve also had a lot of yeses. This year, I’ve had 3 essays published, a poem, a flash fiction piece, and my third novel is crawling along to its June 2022 publication date.

I recently entered a contest for both fiction and poetry for an all-writer voted publication. Everyone who submits also votes on the submissions, the best from each round move on to the next one, and the top 30 submissions make it into the final issue.

I entered round 1 with 3 of my best poems and a short story I haven’t touched in years, thinking that as a serious, multiply-published author, surely I could crack the top 30 with both my submissions.

Well, I didn’t. My short story finished 131 out of 221, and my poems finished 147 out of 239. I didn’t even make it past the first round, and I read some very weak submissions in the first round. I felt immediately dejected. How could I possibly expect to publish and have any level of commercial success with my novel if I couldn’t even have a short story in the top half of a contest? It wasn’t too late to call my publisher and stop the train and go back to the drawing board. It’s not like I deserved that yes!

But that’s the thing about pity parties. They never last long. And I read the nice feedback I got from the writers who read and ranked my submissions in round 1, and all the criticism was totally fair. And prose and poetry are both incredibly subjective, as they should be. In round 1, one writer ranked my poems the best… another, the worst.

Instead of feeling sorry for myself and listening to those negative thoughts about not being good enough, instead I’m going to be happy for the winners because (the ones I read and voted on anyway) their work was really good. I’m going to look forward to reading the final issue with the top 30 stories and poems because I bet it will be amazing. And I’ll keep grinding away at my work and submit something even better next time.

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2019 in review, author goals for 2020!

Published by Kelly on January 8, 2020

In 2019, I had only one writing goal – it was to get serious about submitting Community Klepto for publication and secure a book deal for it. On January 1, I hit the ground running and sent three query submissions. Then, I finally marked an item off my to-do list that had been on there for FAR too long; I dumped GoDaddy and (with the help of my husband who is way smarter than me) stood up hosting for my website myself and gave the website a little facelift. Before the end of January, a publisher wanted to see the full manuscript. Before I knew it, I had my first offer from the same publisher. I thought to myself, holy crap! How could it be this easy?!

Well, it wasn’t. The proposal was with a hybrid publisher who, while selective, required a pretty hefty investment on the part of the author. As attractive as the offer was, I said I wasn’t ready to commit to it yet. I told myself that if 2019 came to a close and I didn’t have any other prospects, I’d go back to the table and take the deal. Over the next 6 months, I sent over 20 more query submissions, one of which I didn’t hear back from until the last day of the year, and it was one of the three I’d sent on January 1! (That’s got to be some record.)

In July, I got a response back from another publisher. This one was local, a small but traditional independent press. The acquisitions editor and I sat down for coffee (outside, in August, in Austin… it gets hot in August in Austin). We discussed possibilities for Community Klepto, shook hands, and decided to move forward! This year, my primary goal is of course to put in the work to bring Community Klepto to market. We’re still editing, and there’s no date yet, but I’m excited about working with Lit City Press to make this book happen! Outside of Community Klepto, I have the following goals:

  • Write one poem per month. Even if they’re terrible Vogon poems. I only wrote one all year in 2019, and I need to do more.
  • Read 20 books. The first book I finished this year was Educated by Tara Westover. Technically I started it in 2019 but I’ll count it.
  • Publish a poem or short story in a literary journal. I did a decent amount of querying in 2019, but my material is so old, I need to get more works into the pipeline. I haven’t been featured in a journal since 2015!
  • Write a new short story. I have no idea what I’m going to write about – maybe returning PJ Masks toothbrushes to the grocery store because they were the wrong character.

Lots to come in 2020! Hope y’all will be along for the ride…

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What is this “book” thing the hipsters keep tweeting about?

What is this “book” thing the hipsters keep tweeting about?

Published by Kelly on August 12, 2017

While I was procrastinating further on writing the pitch for Community Klepto tonight, I decided to go through my Twitter list of publishing people. It’s a list that I’ve been building ever since I joined Twitter, which Twitter tells me was 7 years ago, so most of the accounts I’ve followed on that list about about as old as I am, in Twitter years. As I opened profile after profile, URL after URL, I had waves of mixed emotions as I saw the following:

  • 404 Not Found
  • Domain for sale
  • We have ceased operations
  • We are no longer accepting new submissions

I admit that between switching careers and giving birth to two children on the same day, I haven’t kept up with all the happenings in the publishing industry like I maybe should have; but at the same time, I think I can outline the trajectory of the 7 year Kelly’s-Twitter-publisher-list timeline easily enough:

  1. E-books happen. Some publishers resist all changes. Others pop up looking to cash in early.
  2. E-books gain popularity. Some publishers still resist all changes. Others adapt and innovate. Shitty books get self-published.
  3. E-books soar. Some of the publishers who resisted all changes die. Some who adapted and innovated succeed, some don’t. More shitty books get self-published. Readers start to realize most of the free books they downloaded are shitty.
  4. E-books sales to fall off. The resistors shout that they were right, even as they continue to publish marketable turd sandwiches. Authors of shitty books stop making money on their shitty books. Some of the innovative co-op ventures find they are no longer viable.
  5. Hipsters make physical books cool again. Resistors decry TOLD YA SO. Everyone else is saying Now what?

Now what. Some publishers have died horrible deaths because they refused to innovate. Some died because they were counting on a fad to sustain its growth indefinitely. This is a sad but predictable reality. Some of weathered the storms, adapted where they needed to, and are doing really cool things now. This makes me happy and excited to see what’s next.

I’m not going to go so far as to say that e-books were a fad. I mean, I still read them so they must be cool, right? And I like the papercut and smell of an old book as much as the next hipster. But in a world where evolving technology is changing every industry, publishing is not immune. Their battles for market share aren’t over, even if the e-book is losing ground. The future may be uncertain, but I am certain that as more traditional publishers broaden their horizons (and re-open their wallets), it’s a good time for me to be diving back in.

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Running on empty, not on fleek #MondayBlogs

Running on empty, not on fleek #MondayBlogs

Published by Kelly on February 27, 2017

On top of finishing my third novel, working a full time job, and taking care of two 10-month-olds, I have also recently been training for the Austin half-marathon, which I ran last weekend. By ran, sadly, I mean I injured a muscle in my back in the lamest way possible a couple days before the race, got to run about 5 minutes before my body compelled me to wuss out, and got to walk my gimpy ass back to the car. Not my finest moment. In fact, it was even worse than the day during training that I needed to complete a 7-mile run…

Unlike my protagonist in COMMUNITY KLEPTO, I much prefer running trails to running on pavement or even worse, surrounded by four walls and digital beeps. There is a relatively new trail (it’s been there for quite some time, but the city only recently made it official) that I’d been wanting to try out so I decided to drive to the trailhead and do my long run for the week there. I was curious to explore it A) because the trail connects to the one that leads to my office B) to see if it was a stroller friendly trail I could take the girls on sometime. (I’ll spare you the suspense. It’s not, and that will not happen for many years, if ever.) I parked the car with my full set of keys inside and took my spare car key with me, tucked securely in my flipbelt along with my phone, ID and – in case of emergency – my medical insurance card.

As soon as I finished stretching out and started jogging on the trail, it started raining. It had rained the day before, too, but I’ve always found running in the rain to be masochistically exhilarating so I just kept going. Within two minutes, I hit my first “low-water crossing,” where the creek was running over the trail. I managed to hop over some rocks sticking up out of the creek and got right back to running. It was about a minute before I hit another one. Then another. Then another. About this time, I said screw it and just decided to start running through the water. After all, it might pour rain the day of the half marathon (it didn’t) and I needed to train for every possibility. Plus if I tried to pussyfoot around every low-water crossing, all of which were completely submerged by the creek, I’d be running for half the day. I splashed through a couple more sections of trail covered by the creek when I hit a crossing so low that water was rushing right up around my knees. I was determined to stay undeterred, so I started jogging through it.

And that’s when I fell in the creek. I didn’t go completely under, but got everything below the waist and the entire right side of my upper body submerged. As I trudged myself up out of the water, my first instinct was to pull out my phone and make sure it was okay. Plus I needed to check my GPS tracker. It hadn’t told me I’d gone a full mile yet, and I definitely felt like I’d done at least a mile. My phone was fine, and it informed me I’d almost gone one mile. Just 6 more to go! About this time, I was feeling dejected from falling in the creek and continuing to get rained on, and I started to consider taking a mulligan and trying again next week. But then, just as I turned around to go back to the car, the opening lines of Beyonce’s Halo started playing in my ears, and it was as though Queen Bey herself was lifting me up out of the creek, cheering me on to keep going.

So I pressed on, running through a few more low-water crossings like an excited toddler before I finally reached the part of the trail on higher ground and hit my stride (meaning a faster than 16-minute mile, which is how long that first one took). Things were going great right up until I hit the section of the trail where I believe the intention was to become Spider-Man to get across…

I later discovered that there used to be a bridge here but it got washed out by a freak storm. Of course the knowledge did not help me at the time, and I was forced to find another way to cross the water. This is when I started to veer wildly off the trail. I found myself dodging vines and trying to avoid tripping over fallen tree branches, but I was 3 or so miles in and I wasn’t getting rained on anymore, so I counted it as an adventure. Or I did right up until one of the vines ripped a hole in the ass of my brand new running pants.

This was where I had to pull out my phone again, see how hopelessly lost I was, and backtrack my way to the broken bridge. That super squiggly part on the map? That’s me, post-butt-hole.

The trip back to the car was far less eventful, having familiarized myself with the trail. It also went a lot quicker than I expected, so when I reached the trailhead where I entered, I realized I was still a mile short of my goal. Since I still had Beyonce as my ear-cheerleader, I was not motivated to cut my run short. That loop on the opposite end of the map? That’s me running laps around a liquor store. Classy.

I get back to my car, proud of myself for completing the full run despite the many adventurous obstacles thrown at me along the way, and go to pull my spare car key out of my Flipbelt only to discover it isn’t there. No worries, I think, knowing that the other set is in the car and whenever the key is in range, the hatchback can be opened. There must be a time limit on that convenience feature (that’s less than 1:33), because that didn’t work either. I ended up calling AAA and waiting in the parking lot of a liquor store with part of my butt poking out until the guy showed up to rescue me.

So, I ended my run 7 miles richer and one car key poorer, and I didn’t even get to run the damn half-marathon anyway. So much for my glorious post-pregnancy comeback! I wouldn’t even be able to write this kind of scenario up for my Community Klepto character because it would be completely unbelievable as fiction, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t recount it for y’all. Like Beyonce said, a little sweat ain’t never hurt nobody. I guess my glorious comeback will just have to come in the form of my next novel…

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