It Really Isn’t About Basketball at All, Is It?
I got 3 rejections yesterday alone, and I couldn't care less. (Mostly)
“I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times, I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”
— Michael Jordan
What the hell am I doing?
Starting these crazy projects, writing whatever visions emerge from the chaos of my mind. Starting off with minute reflections and growing to 5000+ word narratives on mental disorders, among other things. With the audacity if not adjacent arrogance that my words somehow add to the conversation...
Any conversation honestly, I’ll take it lol.
I also write satire, humor, multi-genre fiction, and poetry with the same conviction, even worse, I try to get some of it published. Which may or may not happen, but the thing is?
If I stop, it simply will cease being a potential, and become a verdict. See, my pile of rejections continues to grow, 160+ since November of 2025. I pivot, I refine, I absorb the hits not as attacks on my skill, but as opportunities to maybe get better.
I’m not an MFA product, nor out of any writing programs. My beginning and middle are humble as hell. While everyone was freaking out bout em dashes being proof positive of AI composition, I was learning what they even were! Same with semi colons! (still working on it. I’ve settled on it being used for joining two kinda not yet finished sentences?)
But I write anyway, I didn’t know how to edit, so I learn. I didn’t know how to trim, so I try to learn that too. What’s the difference between CNF, prose poetry, and writing a piece via allegory without a distinct protagonist but essentially a landscape of emotional watercolors rendered via adjective and purposeful purplosity? (That sentence was fun to write tbh. I took purple and -osity and fused it together to make a word. It isn’t legit but it sounds delightful to me, so humor me ok?) I still don’t know the difference, but I am learning.
And that’s the point.
Those rejections will keep piling up. Until one day I submit to the right editor at the right venue at the right time—or my writing gets good enough to earn that first placement. All this to say, keep at it, because I am.
I dream big.
I dream hard.
And each bounce is simply a part of the dues I gotta pay for the life I want.
I know there’s no discount for this admission.
But I got a feeling the show is gunna be worth it.
-KC