O, this will be short! I did my reading yesterday! I’d love to go to the movies today. What happened to all the good movies? I had hoped it to Precious while it was here at the Heartland film festival, but it sold out so quickly! Regular readers here were introduced to A Wish After Midnight back in January. Since then, Zetta Elliott who you may remember had to self publish her book. She’s been reviewed by Bookslut, Justine Larbalestier,Neesha Meminger, HappyNappyBookseller and most recently, ALAN Pick of the Month. Books are such personal expressions of our creativity that is has to hurt immensely to have some stranger, some well appointed “expert”, tell you that your work just isn’t good enough. Nonetheless, Elliott believed in her book enough to keep looking for venues to get her book to readers. How do you teach perseverance like this to students? How do you teach them how to know when to hold ’em and when to fold ’em? Especially how do you teach this to children of color who may be shot down at the blink of an eye while this child denies racism even exists? Educators have got to know more than content area! Parents have to make tough choices remembering that they’re being watched, and the same for community members. We’ve got to find reasons to believe in our young people and ways to show them. And when we can’t do that anymore, we have to move on. We have to be honest with them, people of integrity.
I’ve (finally) gotten a lot of good books read, so look for several reviews in the upcoming week.
Cotton Quilts Edi 
“Educators have got to know more than content area! Parents have to make tough choices remembering that they’re being watched, and the same for community members.”
Say it again. Appreciate the post, Edi.
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Edi, you must be in my head. I finally updated my A Wish After Midnight review yesterday, to include nine of the new reviews.
I am sure when Elliott sent A Wish After Midnight to publishers, it had to be polished and tweaked though that true of all novels. But I am also sure Genna’s appeal was there from the beginning. All they had to do was look but they refused or didn’t know how.
So they deemed A Wish After Midnight not worthy enough.
The online reviews (10 that we know of) prove them wrong.
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Thanks, Edi! Sadly, if I hadn’t experienced rejection for most of my early life, I don’t think I could have reached that breaking point! I do wish we could keep kids from going through that same hell, but maybe the years of failure are a necessary part of the lesson…as you point out, we don’t want them not to fail, but to PERSIST!
Doret–I have to say, I got some lovely rejection letters, most of which insisted I wrote beautifully, had created compelling characters…only to conclude with “It’s just not the right project for me.” One idiot agent did call it “cliche” but I set him straight about the actual meaning of that word…thanks to all of you for being with me on this remarkable journey!
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