Writing: How To Deal With Rejection

So a couple of months ago I entered this competition for Young Writers, run by this new publishing company, specifically for young adult readers. I've seen writing competitions here and there pretty often, but this is the only one I've ever entered, basically because I'm usually too young/write for the wrong audience. This competition, however, was for young readers, from young writers, and was in many other ways quite suspiciously perfect. I submitted an old(ish) story, but revamped the first few chapters to try and mature the tone. I read somewhere that they'd only had about 350 entries, and narrowed it down to 20 for the next stage. That's like a 1 in 17 chance (...hopefully...), which I wouldn't fancy in a bet, but for publishing - where odds are more typically in the quadruple-figure area - it's like gold dust. Now I'm not arrogant enough to think I would win, but I did think I had a chance at getting through to the next stage, and that would have been such a brilliant boost.

Yeah, I got rejected.

The frustrating thing is that this is not even new to me. I sent off a load of submissions for my first novel (which was, in retrospect, fairly shite) when I was about fifteen, and amassed twenty-odd rejections. Then I went away and wrote another (less shite, though in fairness still not exactly a masterpiece - the one I submitted for the competition) story, which I sent off to loads of agents. I got another small mountain of rejections, but then an agent asked to see the rest of my manuscript.

Then they didn't email me back for nine months, which I translated as a 'no'. For the record, I am quite certain that the only thing worse than a rejection is being ignored entirely. So I think I've been rejected about forty times, maybe more, and you'd think I'd be used to it by now. And you know, actually, you do start to get used to it - when you're sending off the first wave of submissions the first few 'No thank you's are like physical punches in the gut. Then as they start to pile up, it gets to a point where looking at one of those big A4 envelopes being pushed through the letterbox just gives you this slight twinge of 'Ah, bugger' and then you move on with your day. But it's been well over a year since I got my last rejection, and since this was a bit less of a gamble than I was used to, it didn't feel so much like a punch on the nose as having seven kinds of shit knocked out of my ego.

But after all this time I have learnt how to deal with rejection, and it pretty much goes like this:
1. Buy (and subsequently eat) a tub of Ben and Jerry's
2. Watch The Full Monty (or other feel-good film of your choosing)
3. Feel sorry for yourself (time period subjective, but recommended maximum two hours - otherwise you start pissing others off)
4. Burn a copy of Fifty Shades of Grey (optional)
5. Write a whiney blog post about your first world problems
6. Have a flick through your rejection letters and tell yourself that one day, when your book is topping the bestseller lists, you will send these back to the agents with FUCK YOU written in big, red letters
7. Keep writing

Ultimately, the last one is hardest and most important. But I remember reading somewhere a quote that went along the lines of "The moment you become a writer is when you put the first story on the shelf, and start writing the second." And I think that's really good advice.

At least, I'm sure I'll think that once I've hit step 6.