The Best of Connie Willis

Afterword for “A Letter from the Clearys”

I wrote “A Letter from the Clearys” when we were living in a town in the Rocky Mountains called Woodland Park, up the pass from Colorado Springs. Woodland Park was at that time a little town with dirt roads, lots of pine trees, aspens, and wildflowers, and a gorgeous view of Pikes Peak.

What it didn’t have was home mail delivery. I had to walk up to the post office to get the mail. With my dog. So I suppose you can figure out where I got the idea for the story.

But I also remember the post office for what was the worst day of my writing life up till then, and one of the worst two or three of my whole career. In those days you had to mail your manuscript in to the magazine instead of e-mailing it, and you had to enclose a self-addressed stamped envelope (SASE) so the editor could send it back to you with a rejection slip attached.

Since this meant numerous trips to the post office, I used to buy extra stamps and make out two manila envelopes and two SASEs at the same time, one for the magazine I was sending it to and a second set for the magazine I’d send it to after the first one rejected it.

I got lots of rejection slips in those days (usually literally a slip of paper only an inch wide with “We are sorry, but your manuscript does not meet the needs of our publication” typed on it), but I was always able to keep my spirits up by telling myself that even though this one had been rejected, there was still a chance I might sell the one I had out to Galileo. Or to Asimov’s.

But on this particular day when I went to get the mail, I found not a rejected manuscript, but a yellow slip telling me to go to the counter. Oh, goody, I thought. My grandmother’s sent me a present, and traipsed up to the counter to collect it.

It wasn’t a present, or even a package. It was a stack of manila envelopes with my handwriting on them, all eight of the stories I had had out at the time, all rejected. Not a single one left at Omni or F and SF for me to convince myself I might sell.

Hmm, I thought on the long walk home. Maybe they’re trying to tell me something. And the something was obviously that I should quit, give up, stop making an idiot of myself, and go back to teaching school.

What saved me from doing just that was those already made-out and stamped envelopes and SASEs. I mean, stamps were expensive, and what would it hurt to send everything out one last time?

Luckily, one of the stories in that batch—“The Child Who Cries for the Moon”—sold to an anthology, A Spadeful of Spacetime, which encouraged me enough that I kept writing till I eventually sold to Galileo, and to Asimov’s and Omni and F and SF. And till I wrote “A Letter from the Clearys” and “Fire Watch,” which won the Nebula. And changed the whole course of my life.

But it was close. And even though it sounds like a funny little anecdote now, there was nothing funny about it at all when it happened.

So, to any struggling young writers who may be reading this, my message to you is, “Keep slogging on no matter how many rejection slips you get or how discouraged you are.” Or, as my hero Winston Churchill would put it, “Never, never, never give up.”