I wrote a blog entry about the CPA after it got hacked earlier this year. I'm still there, of course. A year ago, the site owner moved it onto a new server and was forced to get rid of the other, disused parts of the site. This meant we lost our "front page" and all of our articles. I'd already kind of been shifting my "articles" to forum posts anyway, because the front page was so dilapidated. This was a bunch of amateur long-form Magic: the Gathering content. I explored various styles and topics. The most consistent portion of my Magic articles was probably my series, "The Comboist Manifesto." That series has been on indefinite hiatus for a long time, although I did make a brief return to it in December of last year. This has been kind of a sloppy introductory paragraph, but I needed to establish some background. Over the years, I've dabbled in writing articles on topics in Magic: the Gathering. Mostly, this has been confined to the CPA, something I blogged about back in March. That's pretty much it.
There's another Magic site I've been frequenting a lot: EDHrec. Even though I've stuck to my conviction that EDH should just be a fun twist on Magic and not the primary way to play it, I've been rather focused on EDH exclusively for quite some time, as it's the most conveniently accessible way I have to play with the cards I want to play. It has perturbed me that I'm so invested in a format that I see as inherently a kind of side-show, not the main event. But I don't blame EDH for that! No, that's on me. And I do play EDH a lot. Well, I especially played it a lot before all the game stores got shut down due to a pandemic. And EDHrec has been a helpful resource there.
EDHrec publishes articles. I've enjoyed some of them. They put out a call for writers, specifically for "prospective authors who have an idea for a series of articles with a central theme." And I had a central theme I really liked. At first, I balked at writing my Magic-themed stuff anywhere other than the CPA. I also paused at the awareness that musing about this passion project was different from committing to some kind of regular schedule of unpaid labor to see it through. I mean, I used to schedule my CPA content, but lately, everything there has been a lot like what I write here: on a whim. So I gave the matter some thought. Then I decided that I really wanted to do it. The more I thought about it, the more I liked my theme and thought that it would really stand out on EDHrec.
Well, my pitch was rejected. And I can say that the rejection was quite sensible. I sold myself on how cool my concept for an article series would be, how different it would be from what was already on the site. If I were an editor for some publication and someone wanted to create a series that was markedly different from what we usually put out, I'd probably be inclined to reject such a proposal. So really, I think I got ahead of myself on this one. It's quite debatable whether the primary consideration here is that my proposal really was too off-the-wall for the publisher I was contacting or whether I just pitched it poorly. Maybe it was a bit of both. But either way, my proposal was rejected. Like most "no thanks" letters, the response was kind. In fact, it was better than merely kind. The editor not only explained why this concept wasn't a good fit for their site, but offered that if I had a different idea that would fit their needs, I should let them know. It was a solid response and a good way to handle a writing proposal.
My problem is that I don't handle rejection very well. This isn't some preamble to a story about how I behaved badly. I didn't actually do anything. I accepted it and moved on. I didn't lash out. I didn't respond at all. I don't mishandle rejection in some kind of loud or violent way. But I obsess over it. I take things personally when I really shouldn't, and my mind runs wild over benign details. There was really nothing in that email worth getting upset over. And yet I managed to get upset anyway. It's an unhealthy response and it's a personality flaw I don't like about myself. I just don't know how to make it go away.
The more I look back on my unhealthy attitude toward polite, impersonal rejection, the more I worry that it's probably been very bad for me in the long run. Dammit, I hate this about myself. But I don't know how to fix it.
