I...might need a break

Late last summer and early fall, I put everything I had into writing six stories I thought were good enough to get published in one of the stronger literary journals. As I've said before, I'm honored when any journal, however small, chooses something I wrote and gives it a home, but I've been at this for five years now, and if I'm every going to get anywhere with this other than it just being a hobby, then I need to get something published in one of the larger journals soon.

I've had a number of positive responses since then, which is way better than I'd ever done before. But none have quite made it. This morning, I got the most expansive response to a rejection I've gotten yet:

We'd like you to know that overall, your piece was well-received by our reading committee. They have some comments and notes listed below. We hope you find them helpful as you continue to revise or resubmit your piece elsewhere.

--COMMENTS--
“This is a moving, engaging story. I cared about the main character, her story, and her well-being right away. The pacing was appropriate: doesn't drag but it's not a race either. Secondary characters are introduced at the right times and their purpose felt meaningful each time. The dialogue read very natural. Despite my lack of cultural context, I understood exactly what the writer meant. The writer chose great moments to explain details to outsiders but to leave enough mystery to place you directly in the cultural setting. It felt like a story that really cared about its characters.

“The ending might need a rethink - the revelation at the end is a bit forced I felt. But I like the sense of dislocation.”

That's really, really kind feedback. It's way more than you get from most publishers. And most of it is quite thoughtful and also answers a lot of the questions I myself had about how the story might be read: mostly, is it too slow? 

I wasn't quite sure what "the revelation at the end is a bit forced" meant, because I didn't think there was a revelation at the end, really. The main character thinks she might have learned something about another character, but she isn't sure, so rather than take action, she decides to keep watching in a state of hyper-vigilance. That seemed to me to be the natural outcome of a story in which the main theme probably had something to do with surveillance, and the similarities and differences between state surveillance and neighborly looking out for one another. 

But if the readers who obviously paid close attention to the story saw something differently, then I must have failed to communicate it correctly. Which means going back and ripping at this story yet again, and I am so deflated and tired, I can't even think of doing it. 

So here I am, for the umpteenth time, thinking that maybe the hard fact is that no matter how good I do it, it will never be good enough, and I'm just going to go on being unhappy until I accept that and do something else with my life. At the very least, I think I need a break, and that includes this blog and reviewing Pushcart. So it may be a while before I'm back. 

I hate to think that posts like these come off as whining. I don't mean them that way. Anguished, I'm okay with. It's okay to communicate that this stuff is incredibly frustrating, so much that it might not really be worth doing. But I don't hold the world responsible for it. The game I'm playing is very hard to play, and if it's too much, I need to stop playing. I mean only to communicate that the value of playing the game is not always so self-evident to me that I think I must keep playing it at all costs.