8th annual Chin Up for Writers Day

Gulliver from the New York Public Library's collections

Yep, akin to Festivus, I invented my own national day, and it is on its eighth year: the National Chin Up for Writers Day. It originated as a response to a friend on Facebook bemoaning the seeming impossibility of achieving traditional publication, and each year I post a new take on it because it seems so important.

When you're in the rejection stage, it just feels endless. It feels like you can't refresh your email often enough. You wonder what agents are doing. You muse over whether the fact that your email account was pharmaspammed in the last few years means that your emails aren't actually making their way to agents' inboxes, because surely only something so drastic could explain why you aren't hearing back immediately with jaw-dropping interest.

In some ways, you actually deplore the arrival of Friday, because it means you have two days to live through until business hours start up again (but on the other hand, it makes Mondays something nicer than they normally are, because they become hopeful days! Cue the endless refreshing of email).

I've been there and I continue to be there, despite having six traditionally published novels under my belt from publishers like Random House and Kensington. And I too need to remind myself to keep my chin up, because it does seem harder than ever now to capture an agent's heart, mind and willingness to represent you.

Hope springs eternal, though, as I winch my chin up (I imagine a pulley system connected to my ears, something Lilliputians have hooked up to me as if I was Gulliver), and as I write this to you, dear reader, to keep your chin up, too.

It only takes one person to say yes. And in the meantime, while waiting, we can read beautiful books to learn from them, we can start a new project or turn wiser eyes on old ones, and we can even binge-watch The Haunting of Hill House while binge-eating leftover soda bread from St. Patrick's Day! Or is that just me?

Believe in yourself and your book.

That is all.


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Interested in previous year's posts?
First year
Second year
Third year

Fourth year

Fifth year

Sixth year: the year I forgot

7th year: I reposted year one, as an "evergreen" post. I never said I wasn't lazy.


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