Rejections of the Written Famous
By Joyce Spizer 

     Did you know Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team?

      Winston Churchill failed the sixth grade and didn’t become Prime Minister of England until he was 62?

      It took three bankruptcies before Henry Ford found the Ford dynasty?

     Tony Hillerman’s agent told him, “Get rid of the Indian stuff”?

     One movie review called The Wizard of OZ “Unimaginative and boring” and one editor deemed The Diary of Anne Frank “Not interesting enough”?

      If you’re having another nightmare day wrestling with blank pages or pounding the Internet pavement for customers, give yourself encouragement by reading that Fred Astaire kept on his mantel a memo he framed about his first screen test in 1933: “Can’t act! Slightly bald! Can dance a little!” Or that Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, his favorite, sold only eleven copies in his lifetime.

     Former PI Joyce Spizer reinvented herself as a writer, and has since received her share of setbacks. Her first novel The Cop Was White as Snow received 72 rejections, including one as kind as this from a publisher: “I regret to say I don’t think it’s right for me, which has nothing to with your obvious ability to tell a story.”

       After you’ve seen your first dead body at 21, more scathing criticisms don’t faze you. Neither does the dreaded “No.” As Spizer writes in her dedication to the imaginatively titled Rejections of the Written Famous, “’No’ is a word on your path to ‘Yes.’ Don’t give up too soon.” Not even if well meaning parents, relatives, friends and colleagues tell you to get “a real job.” Spizer inspires with the words, “Your dreams are your real job.”

      This book will turbo-charge an inventor, artist or writer’s career with fun facts, stories, and java-jolt quotes from Louisa May Alcott (a manic-depressive who was told to stick to her teaching) to Albert Einstein to Ann Rule. Important lessons: Don’t be afraid to fail, don’t listen to teachers and reviewers (who seem to dole out the most negatives), keep those rejections coming, and someday you could be in Spizer’s revised and expanded edition!