How to Avoid the Rejection Blues by Author Donnie Ray Whetstone
ABOUT DONNIE RAY WHETSTONE
Donnie Whetstone resides in Rochester, Washington with his wife Diane. He is a full time personal trainer with over twenty years of experience and more than 70,000 training hours in homes, gyms and his own private training studio. Donnie is currently the co-owner of Fit Stop 24 Fitness Centers located in both Olympia and Yelm, Washington.
Though Fit to Kill is his first novel, he is no stranger to writing, having written numerous articles on nutrition, weight training and fitness; appearing in newspapers, magazines and the Internet. In Fit to Kill, his experience as a trainer allowed him to truly immerse the reader into the world of fitness in this detective thriller.
Donnie also has 13 years of military service in both the US Marines and US Army serving as a platoon sergeant and acting first sergeant. His experience as a trainer and veteran was extremely helpful in writing Fit to Kill. He is currently in the process writing a new novel with the working title of Night Spear. It combines both the supernatural and military drama.
For more information about Donnie please visit www.donniewhetstone.com.
How to avoid the Rejection Blues
"Success is facing failure after failure with absolute enthusiasm."
Winston Churchill
I want to talk to folks who've decided to enter world of writing, where rejection rules with an iron fists. A lot of you can already attest to this and for those who can't, trust me…you will. In the writing world, rejection is like death and taxes…you can't avoid it. On a positive note, there are ways to avoid those dreadful blues rejection can bring. So before you reach for the anti-depressants, here are some helpful ways I use.
Anticipate rejection. In starting his KFC franchise, Colonel Sanders anticipated a hundred rejections in pitching his fried chicken. With that mentality, thirty rejections is just a warm up. I sent out a hundred query letters to agents with the same mindset. I got rejected by every agent that decided to respond. That didn't deter me, which brings me to my next way to avoid the rejection blues.
Believe in your work. After so many rejections, you can start doubting yourself and your work. Even though every agent rejected me, I knew I had a good story. So I self published. Now, Fit to Kill is a Kindle semi finalist for best indie book of 2012.
Join a writer's group. For nearly three years, I go once a week to the Olympia Writers Group meeting. Each writer reads a piece of their work and then it gets critiqued by fellow writers, and trusts me; at times it can be brutal, with up to ten authors engaging in the equivalent of a Rodney King beating. The benefit is that in time, you can develop a tolerance for rejection thereby avoiding the rejection blues.
Realize you're not going to please everyone. Know the target readership for your work. Readers and agents that are heavily into romance novels will reject works by Stephen King.
Finally, read motivational quotes on overcoming rejection. Also, research the accomplishments of highly successful folks and how they dealt with it. In closing, I'd like to leave you with another quote. It is one of my favorites.
"Success is not in falling down, but in staying down."
To your success
ABOUT FIT TO KILL
How do you stop a personal trainer, who fantasizes about killing his clients, then carries out his gruesome desire on someone else? Making matters worse, how do you stop desires for your own trainer, jeopardizing your marriage? More troubling, do you want to? That's what Detective Tara Tanner must solve in this crime thriller.
La Flore is renowned for its elite personal trainers. This model city however, faces a crisis. Someone is on a killing binge. The killer is vicious and cunning. He harbors a profound irony for one of the nation's fittest cities, and the way he selects his victims makes him untraceable, but this predator has a weakness.
Fit to Kill is a non-stop thriller of fantasy, temptation and redemption, a deadly game of chase, in which the line is marred between predator and prey, a game that reveals how far one will go to kill, and how far the other will go, to survive.
