The benefits of occasionally rage-quitting writing

By all accounts, when you get a personalized rejection letter from an editor, it's supposed to be encouraging. They don't send those to everyone. They don't have the time to tell you they liked it if they didn't. They publish a few stories and send out a few more notes to those who almost made it. If you got a personal note, you were in the top one to three percent. So you should feel good about it.

Video games and me

I tend to get pissed off kind of easily while playing video games. I was like that playing tennis as a kid, too. I broke a fair number of rackets. Nowadays, if I keep playing a tough level in a video game over and over and can't beat it, I have a tendency to chuck the controller on the ground, swear a lot, and quit playing. The kids call this "rage quitting." They generally mock rage quitters, especially in a multi-player game where you leave your teammates down a player, but I can't even pretend that's not me.*

The benefits of the rage quit

As disconcerting as it might be to watch a grown man have a fit over playing a stupid game, there are some benefits to the player. It's sort of a giant reset button. You get away from the problem for a while, maybe go take care of the things you ought to have been doing for the last four hours while you failed at your game. You know, because you're a grown man and all. You remember there are other things in your life besides the game. You could live quite happily without ever beating the game. You don't need to beat that level. And suddenly, you've got it. You realize the way to beat the stupid thing. Sometimes, the best you'll ever play is immediately after coming back from a rage quit.

The getting published part of writing is a lot like a boss level of a video game to me

I usually like writing stories. I usually like editing them. But getting them published is a pain. I have little control over it. Luck is involved. I think I've written the story I always wanted to read, but editors have their own ideas of what they've felt was missing in their lives. You can keep putting a story up over and over again, only to have it fail repeatedly to get past the final level.

This would be an interesting form rejection letter for an editor to use

This is especially frustrating if it's a story you're personally invested in. Last year, I started puttering around with a story and I realized while writing it that I was writing about my adopted daughter and how she'd changed my life. It's been a bit of an obsession to me to get this story published. I feel like I owe it to her. 

I recently got my third encouraging rejection letter, a.k.a. the "almost" letter, on this story. I ought to be encouraged, but really, I feel more like I've now gotten to within seconds of beating the final boss only to have it all fall apart. It's more than just disappointing; it's infuriating. 

So I'm rage quitting for a bit. I don't believe in waking up each day and answering to some higher calling to be a writer. If it's not making me happy, I don't want to do it. But the very act of acknowledging that I can live without it is often just the thing to get me past the hurdle. Either I'll think of some way to change the story that will put it over the top or I'll come up with something new. But I'd never have gotten either without first clearing my head through a little purifying rage. 

*I don't really play video games that much. I haven't for most of my life. But for a while, I was playing a lot when my son's interest in the games exceeded his manual dexterity, and he kept asking me to get him past the hard parts. That phase is long gone, now. But there were definitely some times when I was trying to beat levels for him that I threw controllers across the room.