Hey, guys, it's Scott.
It's Tuesday, April 18th, and forgive me if the sound quality is a little bit different than usual. I'm doing the same thing I did last time and trying to walk my body across Planet Earth a tiny bit before everything contracts into the Zoom contours for this writers room. But the room is going really well. We finished breaking the structure of season one and now we're getting into the episode breaks. So before, we were breaking up the superstructure of the whole thing—this is where Act One ends, this is where Act Two lands, these are the emotional threads. And we card it so it's almost like on digital index cards, and we use these different programs like Miro (or some people use WritersRoom Pro). But essentially, it's like a board of index cards broken down as episodes 1, 2, 3…8. All the major beats, emotionally and plot-wise. And now we're moving into the actual episode breaks. So we do the scene work, we do the scares, we do the dialogue. So this is where it gets really fun and alive, I think. Even beyond being 10,000 feet above it and seeing the superstructure.
But it's Two Question Tuesday, so I thought I'd try and do some fun with you guys and just jump in. But I'm going to do this post how I normally do them we're going to do the first part free, second part paid. I thought for the paid part, I got some questions about the Writers Guild of America (WGA) strike. So I thought I'd translate that into a small summary of what's going on there. Just a few sentences, because you can really look it up and get a much better articulation of it than I can do. But just a talk about different ways that you can kind of create financial stability for yourself as a comic book writer, different ways that people do it. Not just how do you get a paycheck, but how do you create some level of financial floor or safety net? And it's not easy. And again like, we all struggle with it. But just the different methods that some people have for making those cushions from themselves.
But for the free question
Christian asks, “How do you manage rejections well? Or is that just something that never happens to you anymore?”
Yes, I still get it. I assume what you're talking about if I had a period of rejection where it was like, rejection all the time? The answer is absolutely. I was really lucky in comics. I walked in at a time when I had a background in books. But more importantly, there was a big demand for new voices, there was kind of an exclusive contract battle going over between Marvel and DC over who would get this new writer, that new writer, and so I lucked out and came in at a time when I didn't have a lot of rejection in comics early on. But I did have it in books. I mean, I sent out stories trying to get published between like, 1998 and 2004/05. And I have plenty of rejection letters. They're in a drawer at my parents house, I don't need them in my own house. But I'll take a picture one day and show you so you can see that I'm not fucking with you. But yeah, I sent things to every kind of magazine back then from the biggest, like The New Yorker, to the smallest, stapled together local literary journals and got rejected by all of them. But literally hundreds of rejections. So I had been there.
And the thing to know is like, it sucks man. It still sucks, but it really sucked back then. But the way you have to think about it is that it sucks because it hurts. And the reason why it hurts is because you're making something you care about, right? It's a good sign for it to hurt, it should hurt. Because what you're writing matters to you. It's something important to you, you're vulnerable to it. And so yeah, it's gonna cause pain when somebody sends it back and says no. So it's a healthy sign. If it didn't hurt, it would mean on some level that you didn't care. You develop a skin over time, hopefully, but it always hurts. If it doesn't hurt on some level, then you're probably doing it wrong.
But I'll tell you one story. So there was one magazine, I won't name it, but it was like a small literary journal in New York, and I really loved it. And it's still around, actually. And I remember I actually sent a story that became the title story in my Voodoo Heart collection to them early on. And I was really hopeful about possibly at least getting a nice rejection letter. And I did, I got this rejection letter. And this is like, the days before email was so prevalent. Back then we would actually send the story printed out in a manila envelope with a self-addressed stamped envelope in it so people could send you your rejection on your own dime back to your house. So it was a different system back then, different methodology. You paid for your own humiliation. But anyway, I sent this in a self-addressed stamped envelope and I got back a really nice, or at least a handwritten, rejection. In the code of rejection letters, this told you that someone read it and took the time to actually hand-write a rejection even if it was the same words as the form letter. And it made my day, I was so excited.
And then two weeks later, I remember showing my friends that I got another letter from the same people, who had paid it themselves to send me their envelope, which they had stamped themselves and found my address somewhere, even though they had already sent me my stuff back. And they had typed the form letter, and it said “in case you missed it.” So I got two rejections. The second one was a form letter being like, “we didn't mean to send you the handwritten one.” And then, no bullshit, two weeks after that, maybe three weeks after that, I got a third form letter rejection from them that they had paid for, they had stamped, they had sent all by themselves. So it literally was like, “in case you didn't get the last one that said ‘we didn't mean to send you the handwritten one,’ here's this one.” So I remember showing my friends and them taking me out for a beer because I was so crushed. And I still have that one. It's like my golden three rejection letter framed prize.
But yeah, rejection sucks. But again, at the end of the day, it hurts because you care. Find people that are at the same stage of writing as you. That's the other thing, being around people that are getting rejected the same way you are. It forms camaraderie. You come up together, you stick by each other. Like my post last week, I was saying that sometimes it takes ten years, but just being around each other saying, “listen, I believe in you, you can make it,” helping each other make those things better, sometimes listening to a rejection letter that has critiques, all of it.
It’s an important time, it's formative. And later on, believe me, it helps you get rejected a lot. It really does. It helps you to hopefully learn to both listen, filter things, discover, decide which things are worth taking a heart, which things are not, all of it. So happy rejection days out there!
Now I'm gonna move over into the paid part of the newsletter. And I just want to say thank you. We've seen a big uptick in our subscriptions, both free and paid, the last couple months. I don't know what it is that seems to be motivating you guys, but it makes me so so grateful and happy. So thank you guys, I love the relationship that I've been able to form here with you guys, whether it's the Black Jackett Club where I get to actually read your work and talk to you (and we're going to resume those one on ones really soon, sorry we had to take a couple of weeks off for the writers room and for me to get my sea legs with it) down to the free subscriptions where I can interact with you in the comments. I meet so many of you conventions. It's fantastic. I really love this. So thank you guys so much. For the paid section, like I said, what I thought I'd do is talk a little bit about the WGA strike, and more importantly, how to create financial stability. So we're going to jump over there, do that. Again you can always join, $7/month (or $75/year), you get all the classes that we've done so far, all 15 to 20 archived.
You get access to the class that we're going to do in a couple of weeks live. You get to send me to your books if you pay shipping, once a year, for me to sign whatever you want. You get to meet me at cons before the line starts. So hopefully it's a good deal. I don't know, I love doing it. So again, I can't thank you guys enough!
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