I am now finishing week two of this daily blogging experiment, and I never thought I’d be able to come up with something to talk about every day. I never thought I was really that interesting, or that the things I did would be that interesting to others. I think that at this point in the year, the variety of projects I’m currently involved in has helped make the content more readable.

I was also worried (because of course I was) about coming clean about this hiccup in our plans to get the book published. I fretted that I’d look more like a failure than an encouragement to others. After all, we’d told so many people that it was going to be published, and that it was only a matter of time. I felt like this admission would look a lot more like the rejection I was trying not to have it feel like.

But then I had another thought that eventually won out. Why not use my experience to show others who dream that hiccups do come? Dreams do get sidetracked sometimes, and the important thing is not to let it make you quit, no matter how much you might want to.

Truthfully, I’ve often wanted to. But I guess when you come down to it, that’s really the thing that separates a dream from a destiny. Dreams are fluffy things, and if you can be deterred from them, that’s all they were, bits of fluff you used to occupy the ‘what ifs’ of your mind. But destiny…that’s the thing you just can’t escape. Like the sun rising in the morning, it’s the thing you know you’re going to keep coming back to. The thing you can depend on. The thing that no matter what you feel like in the moment, you keep slogging on until the end.

That’s what the message of the book is about. What better way to show the validity of that message, which is chock full of exactly the same kind of circumstances? That this hiccup happened shouldn’t come as any surprise to me, that it didn’t happen sooner should have been the real shock.

Another surprise was the reader reaction. The amount of support and encouragement I received from friends and readers was a bit overwhelming. Their messages were universal…don’t give up. Don’t let this stop you. Keep going.

I will, and I thank you for your words. They came, as encouragement tends to do, just when I needed it most.

Right at 35 days before my 35th birthday, Rachael and I found out that a book we wrote about our experience making our first film “No Lost Cause,” was being returned to us by the publisher after a year of waiting for it to be printed. Instead of wallowing in our collective misery, I committed to blogging every day while I searched for ways to overcome this perceived rejection and obstacle to our goal. I currently also have about three other projects brewing at the same time, and write about the progress of each of them. This is part of that series.

Read the first entry here: https://ashleyraymerbrown.com/2015/01/23/35-days-to-35-dealing-with-rejection/