WRITING: [This is one of those things](http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/004641.html#004641) that all new writers need to read, more than once. It's a very well done look at the way a lot of people take rejection letters for their writing personally. I've received the exact letter used as the first example here and it blows my mind how people can assign such sinister motives to such a small thing. The way I look at it, if I get a rejection letter it just means that I can then work a little more on the story and send it out again. Of course you hope that someday you'll stop getting rejected and start getting paid for your work but you cannot look at these form letters as anything other than an impersonal business communication. I would rather get a rejection letter than nothing at all, which seems to be the main response for publishers in my two chosen fields of comics and science-fiction. If you have any regard for your self-esteem and want to be a writer, you need to see that rejection letters are not in any way related to your personality, your worth as a human being, or anything other than the financial (and to a lesser extent, artistic) sensibilities of the person who read your manuscript. There's about as much point in thinking that a rejection letter is a personal attack as thinking that your car broke down because it didn't like you.