Okay, Um, So What (if anything) Does This Mean?

So as I may have mentioned once or twice, I have entered a handful of contests so far and submitted a few stories and poems to “literary” magazines/publications. And so far I am running, well, let’s just say on a less than stellar percentage… To date I have won one thing I entered (more on that here), and that was, I rather suspect, a result of pressing everyone I know (and a few people I barely know) into involuntary-ish servitude via a series of “click here to help me!” emails. In other words, I won by knowing a larger number of people who like me and are willing to do something relatively painless and easy for me than the other entrants did. In other other words, it was a popularity contest (of sorts). It was also a poetry contest. I am not really so much what I would consider a poet.

Well, GRR, she said.

I don’t want to win popularity contests like that – I want to win because I write better than other people, not because people like me as a person. I mean, sure, I want people to like me as a person too, don’t get me wrong. And if I had an actual book, I’d be perfectly willing to have people buy it because they like me – the money goes into the ol’ bank account the same way whether it was put there by high-brow literary critics or the kids I used to babysit who may feel a bizarre loyalty, know what I’m sayin’?

But I don’t have anything for sale. And I have no way of knowing if I’m objectively any good if people who like me tell me they like my stories. All I have is Blanche duBois’s “kindness of strangers” – and so far, the strangers (aka judges and editors) don’t appear all that favorably disposed toward me.

Now don’t get me wrong – I know that a number of you (actually, the vast majority of you), my loverly oh-so-loyal readers, are in fact “strangers” in the sense that you wouldn’t know me by sight/if you ran over me with your car. Most of you wound up here through a common interest like Book Blogs or something though, so technically we’re not “strangers” because we share a link that way and many of you are struggling writers just like me. That makes us family, of sorts – lucky you! – at least, to me it does. You’re not strangers in the sense of completely random disinterested critics – you have some skin in the game, because many of you are where I am. Make sense?

So I’m trying to figure out if it means anything that I keep getting “thanks but no thanks” responses from those objective critics. I know only one person (usually) can win a contest and that lots of very successful, very famous writers received lots of rejections before their careers went anywhere. But it’s still hard to keep banging away without any (a) compensation or (b) adoration… (teehee)

I will keep at it, don’t get me wrong. But it is a thing that makes me go “hmmm…” nonetheless.