Among my group of fellow creative writing majors, it is literary journal season. Everyone’s accepting submissions for their publications. Me? Well…

I haven’t submitted anything yet.

It takes hours upon hours for me to prepare myself to receive judgment for any of my work. I have to put myself in that zone. Even in that zone, I become even more terrified.

I haven’t found the secret to figuring out how to not be so terrified of it all. Now as I look at the files on my desktop, I am staring at all of these pieces that I’m trying to submit. These are pieces of me. They’re from points in time that I look at and I completely shutter at.

Writers like Ray Bradbury and Stephen King keep all of their rejection letters. They had plenty of letters that they had an entire wall of rejections.

I don’t know what to expect from my first rejection letter. Receiving it, hearing their half-heartfelt apology saying that I should seek another publication or something like that. That terrifies me. But I want it to excite me.

I just think it hasn’t hit me yet.