My late great writing teacher Carolyn See had a number of rules she liked to repeat to all her fiction protégés. My two favorite were, “give away what you need,” and “make rejection a process.”

I’ve spent the better part of my adult life not writing fiction, and have given away so much time to others, but I’ve never particularly succeeded at making rejection a process. Rejection has always been much more dramatic, more a storm than a deliberate task. I would shred a rejection letter over write a thank you note to the rejector. I don’t often put myself out there, so when I do get rejected, it hurts.

But times change. I get older. I get rejected often to things that I feel I should have some place in and often this makes me angry.

But I sat with this anger and at dawn as I awoke angry, I thought just because I wasn’t included didn’t mean I couldn’t participate/ it didn’t mean I couldn’t write my own inclusion in the form of a prompt. Or more. So I went downstairs and painted the words in my head. “you’re my knight in this fortress of delusion.”

Please keep writing a story. Email me at carlyogogo@gmail.com – and we can go from there.