"This is not our customary rejection letter"

Writers trying to get journals to publish their work are always trying to read tea leaves. Does the fact they've held onto my work so long mean they're seriously considering it? Will I have a better chance getting published if I change my cover letter to something more personal? One of the things writers who get rejected a lot (which is everyone) often find themselves wondering is this: "Is that rejection letter I just got a standard rejection, or an "encouraging" or personal rejection, one that means I was close and should try again?"

There's a whole wiki dedicated to the rejection letters of literary journals, trying to determine which are the form rejections and which mean they actually liked your work but just couldn't use it. It's kind of a big deal to get one of these personal rejection, especially from a higher-prestige journal. They don't give them out like candy. (I know, because I've gotten a lot of the form rejections before I started getting the personal ones.)

Some form letters are easy to identify. The formula goes something like, "Thank you for submitting, but it's not right for us at this time." If that's all it says, you got a form rejection. But there are some letters that leave you guessing. The contain phrases like "but we encourage you to submit again," or "we enjoyed your work." Those could be form rejections or they could be meant as the encouraging kind of rejection. (And of course, even a second-tier rejection that encourages you to submit again is often still going to be written using a template, so that might be why some of these phrases are still impersonal.)

One magazine, however, makes it completely clear if you got the other kind of rejection letter, as I've just discovered. Agni just sent a rejection that said this: "Thank you for giving us the opportunity to read X. The manuscript isn't right for us just now, but please consider sending other work in the future. The is not our customary rejection letter. We hope you'll keep us in mind."

What an excellent response! Rather than leave the writer guessing if her work resonated at all, they make it very clear. I wish every journal did that, or something similar to it.

I've had over a year now of getting these personalized kinds of rejection letters, after many years of mostly only getting the standard rejections from everybody. It's nice to know I've gotten better, but I think I've already made the big improvements that allowed me to make easy improvements. From here, it's all going to be greater grinding to make increasingly smaller gains in order to make it over the hump to get into the better journals. It's so insanely competitive. And for the last few months, I've really been leaning toward feeling like it's not worth the effort. So I'm simultaneously encouraged and discouraged. But it's not even a bad form of discouragement. It's more like I've been far enough down the road to know what the landscape is really like, and I'm kind of thinking it's not for me. That's different from the kind of giving up that leaves you with regrets. It's the kind that's informed. It's more like a 26-year-old semi-pro tennis player with bad knees giving up his dream of joining the pro circuit than it is like a high schooler giving up after not qualifying for state one year.

Flab-Bull-Gasted: A response from an editor from Bull Magazine just floors me

I might one day write the great American masterpiece, but an editor from Bull Magazine has already written the great American personal rejection note. I wouldn't normally post something an editor had written to me, since I assume words between a magazine and me are private, but in this case, I think the response I got was so excellent, I really just want to praise the magazine.

Bull, if you don't know, publishes "men's fiction," although they don't define in any sense what that means. I thought I had a story that might work for them. It's been close with a few other journals, including placing as a finalist in a Glimmer Train contest last year. Nobody has quite bitten on it yet, though, and I think it has something to do with how they're not quite sure of the story's themes relative to sexual harassment. The story's main character is a lawyer at a large company in charge of keeping the company on the right side of the law when it comes to harassment, but he's got his own past of bad behavior to contend with.

Anyhow, here's the note that came with a rejection from Bull:

----------------

Dear Jacob,

My sincerest apologies for how long this has taken me to get back to you. There's no good excuse I could give you to make up for the sheer shittiness of leaving you hanging. Suffice it to say I'm kind of terrible at being a functional adult who can be depended on and this is a really fucked up thing to be as someone in charge of a lit mag with authors like you putting your work in my hands. Sorry.

As for Collision, I was really torn on this one, man. The absurdity of premise and the voice all the way up to the ...conclusion are really great in a George Saunders kind of way that I really appreciate. 

In the end, unfortunately, I just felt like we needed Jenna and some of the other women in here to be able to rise to the narrator's sheer volume. I appreciate that you're going against type with Jenna being sensitive, but I feel like it's a bit too easy for the narrator to have Jenna switch to sensitive so quickly and not beat up on the narrator a bit more to be as interesting and nuanced as he is.

Of course, remember that this is just me and I'm kind of an asshole/know-nothing/lousy shithead who leaves a writer like you hanging this long, so really fuck me and my lousy opinions. 

Thank you sincerely for your great patience and sorry that this all ended with such a shitty disappointing low-blow like this email.

Best of luck. 

BULL
-------------------

I can't believe an editor, as busy as they all are, took the time to write something as funny and thoughtful as that. Getting a note like that is nearly as good as getting published. I don't even really disagree with his reasons for not publishing it. I tend to think all stories have an Achilles heel in them, and a good story isn't so much a story that avoids having a weak point as one where the strengths make the reader not care about the weak point. This editor wasn't quite there. I've had the same experience with stories when I edited for the Baltimore Review, and some stories just flat-out left me feeling there was no right answer. In the case in that link, another magazine took a story I just couldn't decide on. So maybe the same thing will happen with this story.


The greatest service literary journals provide is to promote the careers of developing writers. Obviously, the best way they can do this is to publish stories, but letting writers know whether their stories were even close is nearly as useful. Taking an extra minute to say a story got consideration is hugely helpful for writers. It lets them know whether a story is way off or nearly there. If your journal accepts five stories an issue, you should consider also trying to give feedback on another five you thought were close to getting accepted.


Bull did that. (In fact, this is the third time I've had this kind of feedback from them.) So I just wanted to give them a shout-out and say the editors are doing it right.

This has now gotten ridiculous

From the Georgia Review, received today:

"Although your manuscript engaged our attention through several screenings, it was not ultimately selected for publication."

This is the Georgia motherhumpin' Review. One of the best journals on the planet. It now joins these other fine journals in having told me they were very close to accepting this particular story, but not quite there:

• Carve
• The Iowa Reivew
• The Common
• Shenandoah
• Nashville Review

That's six journals, any of which would have been a tremendous breakthrough for me, all of whom said they found a lot to like in it, but it wasn't quite there.

I just don't know what to do anymore. As a reader, I look at this story and feel like I just nailed it. I think it's the best thing I've ever written. It's much better than the stories I've published before. It's on a topic that's in the news, and I quite likely have more insight into this topic than any writer out there. If there's a story I really have to tell the world that's worth a damn, this is it. But it's a long story, which means there are a limited number of places to send it to, and I've sent it to almost all of them by now. I have a few more to try, but why would I expect anything different?

I gave it another look this week. I see I had two sections early on where I messed up sentences during a prior edit. That might have hurt its chances, although anyone who got past those enough to read the whole thing probably didn't say no because of those. My judgment as a reader is that the thing is pretty much right as it stands. There doesn't seem to me to be anything more to do with it.

I talk a lot about giving up, but I really don't want to. I love this story. It deserves readers. But if I can't get this one published, what chance do I have of ever having any kind of real audience as a writer? If I'm wrong about this story, I literally have no idea what's worth reading.

I can't believe a story can be considered good by so many journals of sound judgement, but not good enough by any.

Jesus, if I ever have some kind of definitive breakthrough and am looking back through this blog for moments of despair where it didn't look like it was ever going to happen, this is about as dark a one of those moments as I've felt.

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. 

More of the discouraging kind of encouragement

I've been submitting to Glimmer Train longer than any other journal. I even submitted to them a few times before I got serious about giving writing a go in late 2013. They're one of the few journals I've ever subscribed to. I love that they're just a thing two sisters dreamed up and then made happen. I haven't loved every story they've put out over the years, but I've liked many of them, and I really love that they pay writers and that they always publish a list of not just the winners but also the top 25 for every contest. It's nice to get that little clue that even if you didn't make it, you're on the right track. To make the top 25 is to make the top 2-3% of about 1,000 people, which is about what they usually get, give or take some depending on the contest.

I submitted maybe ten times without ever cracking either top list. Then a few months ago, I made top 25. Just last week, I got a notice that I'd somehow managed to make the top 25 a second time. The editors told me they got over 1,000 for that one, so I was in the top 2% of a ton of people.

I ought to be happy. Maybe I sort of am. But also not. Mostly not. I had a project I really wanted to dive into a week ago. I wrote for a day and then just stopped, not because I was stuck but because I just couldn't see the point. I feel like I took my best shot with this last round of stories, and I'm coming up just short all over the place. This last near-miss with Glimmer Train feels like it has some finality to it.

Maybe that's because Glimmer Train is shutting down after 20 years. This was my last chance to get into it. I realize there are hundreds of other journals out there, but for some reason, I feel like missing out on my last chance to make it in Glimmer Train is somehow my last chance to make it, period.

I am, of course, enormously grateful to Glimmer Train for letting me know I was close. I wish every journal gave you some idea whether you were close. I have a scheme I would use if I ever ran a journal.

Side note: this is all random

That same story that just placed me in the top 25 got a form rejection after a week from a much lower-prestige journal.  You might think that if a really strong journal was close to taking it, a lower-prestige one would snap it up. But it doesn't work like that. Sometimes, it takes the stronger editors at a bigger journal to even realize what they have. I can personally testify that at lower-prestige journals, the editors are so overworked, they really can miss good stuff. I did.

The other story that made Glimmer Train's top 25 has also had a couple of other "we almost published this" notes, but plenty of total ignores as well. So there's being good, and there's luck. Luck submitting a story at the right time relative to the other stories a journal gets, and luck just finding an editor who gets you.

Some people get lucky early in their careers, and some never get lucky. I'm feeling right now like I'm nearer to latter end of the spectrum.

When failing better isn't good enough anymore

If you've ever tried to beat a video game, unless you're a really good player, you'll likely hit a number of cruxes. These are moments where you have a really hard time beating the level you're on, and at some point, you have to decide if it's worth the time you'll have to put into it to get past the part you're stuck on. Sure, if you keep at it forever, you're bound to beat it sometime, but do you really want to invest that much time in a video game? Don't you have other things you could be doing? Didn't the game stop being fun a while ago?

As you try and try to beat the game, you'll likely have a moment where you almost get it. Either you change your approach, or you get a little better at what you were trying, and you very nearly beat the level. Close, but not quite, and that's usually when you throw the controller down and spend some time asking yourself how much you really want to beat this game.

You've gotten closer than you ever got, but to get even better, you're going to need to change somehow. You're going to need a genuine gaming catharsis. You might also need just a little bit of luck, as some levels of the game require you to get the right random combination of things at the same time as you are playing at your best.

I've had a lot of those kinds of moments lately with writing. No writer goes right from zero to success right away. It's a tough road for everyone, and even the extremely talented have to do some heavy lifting to get where they want to be. Earlier in my life, I decided writing seemed too hard for me, and I abandoned it for a decade or so. When I decided to really try it again five years ago, a big part of that decision was me agreeing with myself to keep pushing through a lot of failure. I didn't always keep that promise. I threw the controller down many times, but I always kept picking it back up after a break.

A really good rage quit is almost as satisfying as actually succeeding 

That led to "failing better," to paraphrase Samuel Beckett, and even to what you might call beating a few levels--publications in some smaller journals, the book, etc. For the last two years, I've been trying for a much harder level--cracking into one of the top 50 literary journals. At first, I didn't get very far, just form rejections. Last fall, I took a whole new approach to writing and cranked out five new stories. The results have been coming in for the last few months. In that time, I've gotten rejections but with encouraging notes from five of those journals: Glimmer Train (who put me on their honorable mention in a contest), Iowa Review ("we gave serious consideration to your submission and found it very promising"), The Common ("we were impressed by your writing and would like to see more work in the future"), Shenandoah ("we found much to admire in this story"), and One Story.

This is "failing better." Any writer will tell you a rejection with a note is far, far better than a form rejection. You got noticed off the slush pile, out of hundreds of manuscripts. You were probably in the last round of selections, you just didn't quite make it. I ought to be encouraged, but I'm kind of at a point where failing better isn't cutting it anymore.

This is where, to keep the video game analogy, I might just need a little luck to go with doing it better. An editor somewhere who has a personal connection to my subject matter, maybe, or just having someone read it on the right day to be in the mood for what I'm laying down.

I just don't know if I can stick with it that long. I'm not saying I quit, and I'm not saying I'm going to keep going. I'm saying I threw my controller down with one of those encouraging-but-not-quite messages, and I haven't gotten to where I can pick it back up yet. I might wake up one day and feel like I've got a way to get past the next boss, and I might decide I ought to do other things with my time.

One thing that's very different about writing from trying to beat a video game: the lag time between trying something and finding out if it works can take between a month and a year, and you don't always know what it was that killed you.

I'm sharing this in case other writers ever feel the same. I mistrust advice that tells you to keep going and believe in your dreams no matter what. I also mistrust advice that tells you the opposite. What I trust is when someone tries to tell me the truth, so that's what I'm trying to share with you. There will be moments as a writer when you don't know if you really ought or want to keep going. The only way to know if you should is to put down the controller for a bit and see how drawn you feel to pick it back up.

Props to the Adirondack Review: The "encouraging rejection" is one of the best services a literary journal can provide

I've probably written about rejection more than any other subject on this writing blog. That's because it's the single most ubiquitous fact of writing life. That doesn't change after a few publications or a few dozen or a few hundred. Nearly every writer faces rejection, even the stars. True, if you're Cormac McCarthy, your form of rejection might be that you didn't win a Pulitzer this year, instead of that your story didn't get published by the Zimber Creek Review, but either way, you're going to face disappointment.

I've received a few rejections just this week, but one of them stood out. The Adirondack Review added a little note to the automatic notification. They wrote this: We really enjoyed your work, and it was a strong contender for publication in The Adirondack Review. However, we regret to write that it was not selected. We encourage you to submit again.

Literary journals, most of which make no money (in fact, they often have to exist off the largesse of a patron who endows the magazine), are providing a valuable service to American literature. They provide a training ground for the next important writers to emerge. Without small journals, there wouldn't be as much good work coming to the big journals, and there wouldn't be as many writers perfecting how they write enough to produce important novels. 

Choosing stories for publication is always subjective, by definition. A story later regarded nearly universally as great may spend years getting rejected before is gets published. Jacob Guajardo's "What Got Into Us," one of the choices for this year's Best American Short Stories collection, spent two years getting rejected before it finally found a home, which led to it eventually being picked for BASS.  

What that means is that there is nothing "right" about any choices a journal makes. A "good" story is more likely to get published than a "bad" one most of the time, but there are all kinds of reasons why a good story might be hard to recognize at first. It's also very hard for a panel of editors to pick the "best" of what they got. One editor might like it, another might hate it, and a third might be on the fence.

What I'm getting at is that even though small journals do a great literary service by giving developing writers a place to go to test how they are doing at developing as artists, the feedback writers get isn't always going to give the right messages. This is especially true if you are only getting a "yes" or "no" every time. I can tell you, as a former literary journal editor myself, that there are a hundred different kinds of "no," from "almost made it and probably should have made it, in retrospect," to "I quit reading after one sentence."

So when journals go the extra mile to let you know that you made it past the slush pile and got real consideration, that's incredibly useful feedback. It says you're on the right track, and there is probably something to the story you've got. It might need a tweak, or it might just need to be submitted more. But either way, it hit a nerve somewhere, which increases the likelihood it'll do the same somewhere else. It takes a minute to craft that extra language in the email, and I understand that every journal everywhere is overworked, but just writing a few of those kinds of rejection with every edition you put out makes a journal's impact to the writing community much stronger.

It was especially useful to hear this response on the story in question, which is really an oddball. I wasn't sure that editors would even be open to the premise at all. This is now the second rejection-with-feedback I've had on the story, though, so I guess I'll keep pushing forward with it. I'd never know, though, if it weren't for editors who care.

Best of luck placing your work elsewhere

As I posted a few days ago, I finally got a story published again, after about a 15-month slump. It's never fun getting rejections, as I've written about in painstaking detail from time to time on this blog. Someone recently posted a photo of a t-shirt he got from Barrelhouse Magaizine. It says, "Best of luck placing your work elsewhere."

It's a bit of hapless writer gallows humor.  A typical form rejection letter from a literary magazine goes something like this:

What to do with a novel I can't publish?

Obviously, I'm not doing much with writing these days. I'm not blogging much, and it's not because I'm furiously writing my next batch of short stories. I've moved on.

But I still have this novel I wrote. I really like it. I pitched it to thirty-some agents and got only a few responses. They were all no responses, even if some claimed they really liked it.

A few weeks ago, I got a delayed response from someone else I sent it to. This would be another "no, but I like it" kind of response. Here it is:

I'm afraid this one isn't for me. But, I have to say, your writing is tight and very accomplished. And - most important of all for a writer who is trying to be funny -- the voice IS funny! When the narrator breaks the fourth wall and speaks directly to the audience, I think most writers make a mess of it. But you accomplished this task 100%. Congrats on that. So, so difficult to do.

I would suggest that you focus a bit more on leading the reader into the story. Right now, it feels like we're all over the place. There's a lot going on in the first few pages and, while the narrator does an excellent job at telling the story, it still feels like we're jumping around - one moment you're talking about the job, then your son, then (the country) and its history. Overwhelming the reader early on doesn't give the reader a chance to really sink into the story. I want to know the point early on, and then get hooked and dragged along to the end. 

It's difficult to know what to do with a response like this. The main reason he wrote it, probably, was just to be nice and let me down easy. He thought what I wrote was decent, but not what he was looking for, so he very kindly decided to add a little encouragement with the rejection. He also tried to give some reason for why he didn't pick it. But he probably spent very little time considering either the positives or the negatives of what he wrote. His main goal was to get the message out that he was saying no but to make me feel not too terrible about it.

Which is why the critique doesn't really make much sense. How can the writing be both "tight" and also "all over the place"? I think what he means is simply that each of the first three chapters have completely different settings, and I keep on rotating the setting of the chapters throughout, although not always with each new chapter. That is an intentional, conscious decision, one that hundreds of novels use each year. Rather than confusing the reader, I feel like it keeps the novel from seeming dull from right out of the starting line. If there is anything that leaves you confused, I'm hoping the humor and observations are enough for you to trust I'm taking you somewhere. It's possible I used that technique poorly, but this feedback seems to be criticizing the novel just for the technique itself. That's a strange response to a standard literary technique for a publisher that leans toward the literary-fiction side of things.

I'm in no way complaining. It was nice of him to write anything. The fact he tried at all means he might have thought it was better than most of what comes across his slush pile. But I've seen these kinds of explanations for a no answer all the time when working on the Baltimore Review--the editor feels the need to justify the no, but doesn't have a lot of time for it, so he relies on vague statements like "it didn't take me anywhere" or "the characters didn't come to life for me." It's meant to make the point that you tried to explain your response without really having to put too much work into really explaining it. It's what he had time for. I appreciate it, but it doesn't tell me anything about what to do with the novel.

What to do now

I'm out of patience with trying to get it published. At the same time, I like the novel, it's about an important subject, and I have more personal insight into that subject than most almost anyone who's  written about it. That doesn't mean it's a good novel. Even if this particular criticism isn't that on-the-money, the story might just not be that good. Still, I just can't escape the notion that I'm supposed to put this novel out there, even if it's a complete failure commercially and critically. I could do that by self-publishing it. It wouldn't be what I'd want, but I'd feel that I'd fulfilled whatever obligation it is in my head to put this out in the world.

That's a ridiculous way of thinking, flawed by magical thinking. People do not have destinies they were meant to fulfill. They have things they are good at, and they should try to use those abilities to fill voids in the world and be useful. I ought to keep moving on with other things. Trying to publish a novel now would just be a distraction.

I was thinking I'd take the summer to edit the novel, which is now two years old since I wrote it in a blur in late spring and early summer 2016. I thought I'd see how I felt after editing it. But even an edit now seems like a lot of time to invest in something that's a bit of a fool's errand.

Several years ago, I had no reason to think anything I wrote would ever be published, no reason to think I was writing for any purpose beyond having done it. But I had limitless energy to write back then. Now, I've had a little taste of success and nearly saw the novel get to an agent who wanted it, but I feel like writing is pointless. The reasons why aren't unique--I wonder if writing is useful and if mine says anything worth saying. But they're reasons I feel pretty strongly. Writing seems like an incredible act of faith, such that I can't even find the will to bring to completion work that I've mostly finished already.

The benefits of occasionally rage-quitting writing

By all accounts, when you get a personalized rejection letter from an editor, it's supposed to be encouraging. They don't send those to everyone. They don't have the time to tell you they liked it if they didn't. They publish a few stories and send out a few more notes to those who almost made it. If you got a personal note, you were in the top one to three percent. So you should feel good about it.

Video games and me

I tend to get pissed off kind of easily while playing video games. I was like that playing tennis as a kid, too. I broke a fair number of rackets. Nowadays, if I keep playing a tough level in a video game over and over and can't beat it, I have a tendency to chuck the controller on the ground, swear a lot, and quit playing. The kids call this "rage quitting." They generally mock rage quitters, especially in a multi-player game where you leave your teammates down a player, but I can't even pretend that's not me.*

The benefits of the rage quit

As disconcerting as it might be to watch a grown man have a fit over playing a stupid game, there are some benefits to the player. It's sort of a giant reset button. You get away from the problem for a while, maybe go take care of the things you ought to have been doing for the last four hours while you failed at your game. You know, because you're a grown man and all. You remember there are other things in your life besides the game. You could live quite happily without ever beating the game. You don't need to beat that level. And suddenly, you've got it. You realize the way to beat the stupid thing. Sometimes, the best you'll ever play is immediately after coming back from a rage quit.

The getting published part of writing is a lot like a boss level of a video game to me

I usually like writing stories. I usually like editing them. But getting them published is a pain. I have little control over it. Luck is involved. I think I've written the story I always wanted to read, but editors have their own ideas of what they've felt was missing in their lives. You can keep putting a story up over and over again, only to have it fail repeatedly to get past the final level.

This would be an interesting form rejection letter for an editor to use

This is especially frustrating if it's a story you're personally invested in. Last year, I started puttering around with a story and I realized while writing it that I was writing about my adopted daughter and how she'd changed my life. It's been a bit of an obsession to me to get this story published. I feel like I owe it to her. 

I recently got my third encouraging rejection letter, a.k.a. the "almost" letter, on this story. I ought to be encouraged, but really, I feel more like I've now gotten to within seconds of beating the final boss only to have it all fall apart. It's more than just disappointing; it's infuriating. 

So I'm rage quitting for a bit. I don't believe in waking up each day and answering to some higher calling to be a writer. If it's not making me happy, I don't want to do it. But the very act of acknowledging that I can live without it is often just the thing to get me past the hurdle. Either I'll think of some way to change the story that will put it over the top or I'll come up with something new. But I'd never have gotten either without first clearing my head through a little purifying rage. 

*I don't really play video games that much. I haven't for most of my life. But for a while, I was playing a lot when my son's interest in the games exceeded his manual dexterity, and he kept asking me to get him past the hard parts. That phase is long gone, now. But there were definitely some times when I was trying to beat levels for him that I threw controllers across the room. 

What to make of all these encouraging rejections

I got another one of those emails today. Dear Jake, although we're not going to publish you, we liked your writing enough that we were able to distinguish it somewhat from the mountain of rubbish in the slush pile. If you sent something to us again, we might be interested in reading it.

Every writer who isn't George Saunders knows the struggle of submitting short stories to literary magazines. There's rejection--the majority of what you face--and there's an occasional acceptance to keep you going. But then there are also those in-betweeners, the "encouraging rejections."

I've gone back and forth on how "encouraging" an encouraging rejection is. On the one hand, of course it's nice to know someone noticed it. And it does mean something. With ratios ranging from 50 stories to one you can accept to thousands to one, every editor has to let go of stories she likes. So it's nice to hear that even if you weren't the one in a hundred, you were still in a select group. It's some validation.

On the other hand, it can be a little maddening to know you were close but not quite there.

These conflicting feelings get stronger when the journal giving you the nice no is one of the big ones. In the last four months, I've had four of these from four different journals that are generally considered "top 50." I know that these aren't just form letters, because I've sent stories to them before and not gotten this secondary type of rejection. Earlier, all I got was "it's not for us."

I guess I could take it as a sign that I'm growing as a writer, and if I keep at it, I might get a big breakthrough sooner or later.

On the other hand, I'm so exhausted from the effort I've made up to now, and feeling so much like I ought to quit writing and do more responsible things with my life, that it feels like this was the final close-but-no-cigar. Right now, my son is upstairs not doing his homework, because I'm downstairs  writing and not making him do it. I should do something more adult with my time, shouldn't I?

I imagine reactions to rejections are sort of Rorschach tests for writers. True believers will not be deterred by any amount of rejection, even if the local high school turns you down for a journal that all citizens are invited to with the note "Please never write again." Pessimists will always see a down side. Even if the New Yorker picks their piece, you can then whine that it didn't go as viral as "Cat Story" or didn't get picked for Best American Short Stories. Me, I'm an agnostic, and that means I see mixed results in everything.

One way or another, I feel like 2018 is a year where something is going to happen. It might be the year I make some key breakthrough, or it might be the year I hang it up. These last four years of making an honest effort to write successfully have so far felt like I've come to an inconclusive draw. I can't help but interpret these notes as a sign that I'm either boutta knock this writing thing out or get knocked out. 

What it means when your story is in Submittable a long time

This is a subject that a lot of blogs on writing have covered. Does it mean anything if your story is in Submittable for a long time before it gets rejected? Specifically, does that mean that the editors thought it over a long time before sending the rejection? If you're waiting on a notice and it's been in there a while, do you have a better chance of acceptance, because the editors are spending time mulling it over?

Generally, I'm going to agree with the community consensus on this and say that you shouldn't make too much out of the length of time something is in the system before you get a notice. But I will differ and suggest that it might tell you something, but only in specific circumstances.

The basics

Submittable is the system by which about 85% or so of literary journals accept submissions. (That's a totally subjective figure based on my own experience. Many of the very high-end journals, however, use their own systems rather than Submittable.) I assume you know this, or you wouldn't be reading my blog, but you never know. Maybe you just like to check in from time to time to see if I've posted any new photos of myself that show the progress of my baldness.

When you submit a story, Submittable gives you a status of "received." Some time later--could be five minutes, could be a year--you'll see the status change from "received" to "in progress." "In progress" means that somebody has done something administrative with your story. Clifford Garstang's excellent blog tells us that merely opening a story does not change its status. Kelly Davio, however, guest blogging for Submittable, so I take it as authoritative, tells us that the only time a story can be opened without it changing status is if the reader closes the browser without first voting, assigning, or going back to the main screen. I've tested this by submitting to a journal where I myself am an editor and messing around with my submission in various ways. I'm actually going to lean with Clifford on this. I think you have to actually make an administrative action to a story. Which means you can't really tell from the disposition status whether anyone has looked at it or not. It all depends on the magazine's own preferred process for going through submissions.


Types of literary journal staff structures

Structure One: Well heeled journal with lots of intern slaves. This type of magazine probably assigns your story very early on, because they have a specific person to assign it to. How long it takes for someone to read it and vote on it from there is anyone's guess, and you won't know when it happens. So unfortunately, with the heavy hitters, you won't have any idea based on time what's going on. Most likely, it'll be a while. The good news is that a lot of the stronger journals will give you an "encouraging rejection" if they liked what you wrote and just didn't have room for it.

Structure Two: Ordered, but small. This is a magazine where everyone knows the drill and the machine is well oiled, but there aren't a ton of student interns to command. Often, there is one editor for fiction, one for poetry, one for non-fiction, and that editor does everything in that genre. Here it's a total crap shoot. It's up to how that editor likes to do things. She might open it up, read a page, then put it aside if it looks like it's something she'll need to give time to later. I do this sometimes as an editor. Some nights, I am just going through the slush looking for bad stories I can get rid of easily. If I find something decent, I leave it for later. Or the editor might never touch the story until she's ready to read it for real. In this case, you're likely to go from "received," straight past "in progress" and on to accepted/rejected in a very short amount of time. There's no committee to talk to. It's just one person, and she reads and makes a decision. In other words, there's not much you can tell from this.

Here's the exception, and the one time when being in the system a while might mean your odds are improving: Let's say it sits there for a while in "received," and then one day it goes to "in progress," but then it waits again for a while. To me, that might mean the editor finally got the story and then had to think about it. So if you submit to a magazine like this, and you're in "received mode" for a long time and THEN you go to "in progress" and sit for a long time, it MIGHT mean something.

Structure Three: Controlled anarchy. There are several editors for each genre, and nobody is really telling anyone what to do. All the editors are free to go in and read what they can, when they can. This is the model on the journal I work with, and I suspect it might be common for journals where the inbox is too big for one person but the staff is still all volunteer.

This is the structure where I think your story sitting in "in progress" mode for a long time is most likely to mean something. This is especially true if it took a long time to go from "received" to "in progress."

We like to have two editors vote no before we reject a story. This isn't always possible, but it's how we like to operate. Very often, once a story gets one vote, someone else jumps on it so we can close the loop. If we don't like the story, it often will go from "in progress" to rejection in days.

So if your story waits a while to get opened, then gets opened, then sits around a long time (say a month), I'd say that with this type of journal, there's maybe a 60-70% chance that it means people were divided on the story. There are other things that might be going on--sometimes, anarchy means that people just aren't paying attention, and a story that needs to be finished up just gets ignored. But I think the odds are that if your story didn't get assigned soon after coming in, and when it finally does get opened it sits for a while, it probably means something. But only for structure three. It could mean that for structure two, also, but it's harder to tell. With just one person, they could have any kind of system.

How do you know what type of magazine you've submitted to? Well, you don't, unless you know someone who works there. But you might be able to form guesses if you submit to the same place several times and start to notice trends.

I really think all journals ought to do a good job of differentiating between rejections. If a story made an editor or editors think before tossing it, they ought to send a different kind of rejection. It ought to be clear that the "encouraging" rejection actually means "we read your story and liked it more than we like most stories we get." That's the easiest way to tell what a journal thought. Well, that, and actually getting accepted.

In any event, for you, the beleaguered author trying to get some acceptances and make sense of it all, I think it's best to heed the majority advice: a rejection doesn't mean a whole lot, and it's best not to try reading tea leaves. Enough journals will actually tell you if you merited a closer look that you should pay a lot more attention to those than you do to time spent in limbo.

Heretic recommends: Tahoma Review's "fiction with feedback"

I spent $7 a few weeks ago to submit a story to the Tahoma Review. Normally, it doesn't cost that, but for the $7, they promise to give you some feedback. I got my feedback this week, and it was well worth the money. It wasn't exhaustive, but I wouldn't expect it for that price. Rather, they gave a two paragraph response as to why they didn't accept it.

Sure, I've been pretty negative on getting feedback, but I found this useful enough for what it was. Turns out, the reason they rejected it had a lot to do with the same flaw I saw in the story. It was a flaw I'd tried to iron out in later versions, but they didn't feel I'd quite attended to the issues. That doesn't mean, of course, that they're right. But right and wrong isn't really what you're after with something like this. You want to know the impressions someone had. It's like when I do a "Would I Have Published This Story" bit. I'm not saying I'm right or wrong, I'm saying this is how I think I'd have voted on a story and why. It's not criticism, it's just pulling back the curtain on what the gut reaction of a reader was.

I'd say that $7 was pretty good money, then. I've gotten less for a lot more money other places. The takeaway for me was that I might not have a story there right now. I'll probably pull that one and let it sit. Sometimes, at a later date, I get an idea for how to rework something, and then the original story becomes something new and better. I'm hoping that happens here.

Reading the tea leaves of rejection

When I first started this blog, I wrote a lot about the sordid guts of getting rejections. I didn't do it to be morose, exactly. I wanted to accurately reflect both what one encounters and what one thinks while trying to publish stories. There is something reassuring to knowing that you aren't the only one getting tons of no answers, wondering if you were close, wondering why the stories that did get picked are better than yours, wondering if you will ever get anywhere with it and if it all makes any sense.

About a decade a go, another writer who was going through the same issues started a blog called Literary Rejections on Display. It had quite a following for a while. I'm not sure if its popularity ebbed because nowadays, people seem to prefer to watch people on YouTube talk into a camera rather than read a blog, or because she actually finally did break through and get a few books published. When I started my own tour of rejections, though, it was a great help to me to go back through her litany of rejections.

It was especially helpful that she posted a lot of the actual rejections she got. Commenters chipped in, too, which meant you got to start to form a sense of whether the rejection letter you got really was encouraging or if that's just what they send to all the writers.

The options when it's a no

Most journals just send a pretty unambiguous no, something like "Thanks for sending to ___, but unfortunately, this story isn't for us right now. Best of luck placing it elsewhere."

Sometimes, though, you'll get a note that says something like, "Although we are not publishing this story, we admired your writing, and would like to see more of it." There are two options here: either it's sincere, or it's letting you down easy. Why let you down easy? I guess to get you to keep submitting. This is especially possible if it's a journal that charges enough from its reading fees to make money off of them.

But for most journals that are either free to submit to or only charge a few dollars, why would they lie? I assume this is a second kind of form rejection letter. The journal probably has three choices. Door number one is to accept. Door number two is to reject. Door number three is for the good-but-not-good-enough, who get a consolation prize of the more encouraging rejection letter.

I assume that when a journal that isn't charging a lot for submissions tells you they want to see more of your work, they mean it. Nobody wants to read through crap. If they see something that's almost there, they'd rather get more of that in the future. I assume they only want to encourage writing of the kind they'd like to see again. But it's so hard to be sure.

A lot of writers suggest that you just look at whether it's a yes or a no and forget the rest. There is nothing to be gained by considering how long it took to get a decision or what they said after the no. But with some journals in particular, the kinds where to get in would really be a big breakthrough, I can't help it.

Which brings me to the past two weeks

I've had either one, two, or three of these kinds of rejections in the past two weeks, depending on how you count them.

#1: Although this piece isn't going to be a go for ____, we like your writing and would welcome the chance to see more from you.

#2: While we enjoyed 'Story X,' we didn't quite feel the ending wrapped up in a satisfying way. We appreciate your interest in NR, and hope you keep us in mind for future submissions--we'd love to see more.

#3: Unfortunately this particular piece was not a right fit for ____, but we were very impressed by your writing. We hope that you will feel encouraged by this short note and send us something else.


I could take any of those to be the kind of response you'd get if the editors thought they'd just seen a story worth at least a moment's thought. #1 might just be what they send everyone, since it's not terribly effusive, but again, why would they encourage more stories they will just reject? #2 suggests that they at least read to the end, which is actually a very good sign. #3 is the real one I wonder about. #3 was a journal that would have been a very big deal to get in. But they also tend to be a bit aggressive with offering extras, like writing seminars. So maybe my hope is important to them. It's very hard to know. I just know that I sent out a lot of work to some very hard-to-crack journals out there, and I'm likely to keep getting more rejections in the next few weeks, which means I'm likely to keep trying to read tea leaves to know if there's more to the no than just a no.

I can't imagine I'm the only one like this, which is why I'm sharing it. If you are reading this and thinking that you can't stop wondering what your "no" means, that means you're like everyone else.

Depression and the literary editor

I've written roughly a zillion posts about how writing, especially the rejection side of it, causes me to feel like shit bordering on depression. This week, I began to consider the extent to which my eight months as a fiction reader take a toll on my psyche.

Years ago, when I was trying to get published in Agni, one of the top literary journals out there and for which I was clearly kidding myself, I must have subscribed to their newsletter. Maybe I thought this would somehow increase my chances of publication. Whatever the reason, I've ignored it every time it has come, but for some reason chose to read it this week.

In a meditation called "The Sluice," Agni Editor Sven Berkerts talks about how he is liberated each summer when Agni stops accepting submissions for three months. "Closing the sluice never fails to deliver a bit of a body-shock and then, almost right after, a growing sense of psychological well-being....This is...because for a fixed period of days I know I'll be free of the remorse of saying no to hard-working writers."

Berkerts remembers his own writing life, the bundling of papers and postage and envelopes and trundling it all to the post office to wait and wait and wait for what was often bad news. His life as editor is therefore "tinged with guilt," because he is the bearer of bad news to hundreds of writers a week.

He attempts to wrap up by trying to clarify what Agni is looking for from writers--not very successfully, I thought, although it's not really his fault. I've never seen any magazine adequately answer the "what we want" question. It's an impossible question. The best answers I've read are more what they don't want--we're tired of stories in bars, for example. We're against stories in which children are raped. We generally don't publish stories written in second person. That's at least a little bit of a help. But nobody can explain what they want. Berkerts' attempt, "writers thinking things through from the ground up, using language that is free of the innumerable standard conformities," is a description of what we all know we ought to be doing, but doesn't tell us anything about how to do it. It's saying "we want writing we think is good."

I can't blame him for trying to end on a positive note. I've noticed in just eight months that being an editor/reader is tough on me psychologically. I give a lot of no votes, even though I say yes a lot more than I should, statistically speaking. I feel terrible about not even reading to the end many stories that I can tell were written with great affection, but which I can tell just don't have the juice.

The morose feelings aren't just because I'm dumping on somebody's dreams, though. I now have an entirely different way of looking at my own submissions. I'm the one putting one more task onto some volunteer reader somewhere. I'm the one flicking one more little spark of troubled conscience their way.

More than that, I now have a very visceral feel for the sheer numbers involved. It's one thing to know that 200 people submit for every story a magazine will publish. It's another to count to 200 one-by-one, reading a story for each tick. It's the difference between knowing a marathon is 26.2 miles and running one.

At my day job, I work for an organization with tens of thousands of people. Every day is like a major sports event in terms of the number of people there and the logistics necessary to take care of them. I occasionally get the sickest feelings. I think about all the food, all the animals slaughtered, all the fertilizer dumped, to feed all of us. I think of all of us excreting in various ways, all of the sewage we create. I feel incredibly superfluous, like if I were gone, it would make no difference at all, except to decrease slightly the demand for sewers and fertilizer. 

That's how being an editor makes me feel about writing. The supply of writers is enormous. Nobody needs me to write. Over the past year, I've become much more aware of both how much it sucks to say no all the time and how inevitable nos are. It makes the sting of a rejection actually worse, rather than better. It's a confirmation that I'm just another writer in the sluice.

I'm thinking of ending my volunteer stint as an editor at the end of the year. If I don't just end my writing career or my life first. Our summer break ended Tuesday. We got over 30 submissions the first day.

Rejection Thursday special: a quick idea for literary journals to easily provide more than just a no

Work informed me that today was "Thankful Thursday" and asked us to share our gratitude. I thanked the lady who sells me my coffee. She's probably more efficient and performs more tangible good in the world than anyone else I see at work. Then again, I thank her every time she gets me coffee. I'm an asshole, but not a jerk.

Anyhow, I've decided to dub the day "Rejection Thursday," which has zero alliteration, but is still 97.2% less dumb. The day after posting about a really strange coincidence where a story I voted on in the literary journal I work with showed up in the copy of Prairie Schooner I was reading, I got my own rejection from Prairie Schooner. Not really a big deal; it's a tough journal to get into. But this is one of those stories I really have an extra amount of attachment to. It's inspired by my daughter, who is not officially my daughter, but who needed a place to stay six years ago and I've called my daughter since. It's not much of a real-life-transcribed-into-fiction story--almost none of what happens in the story happened in real life--but it is the best shot I've taken at expressing some of the things I've felt and learned having her in my life. It's got all my own inadequacy and failure to be for her what she needed, all her elusive charm built of her own survival mechanisms she's developed while dealing with things I can't--and don't want to--imagine. I felt drained after writing it. Every rejection I get for this story feels like I've failed her somehow.

So what do I want journals to do?

I understand all too well that journals can't respond to every submission. They can't even do it for 10% of the stories they get. But here's something I'd like to see journals try: have each reader/editor who weighs in on the story assign it a 1-10 rating. They don't have to justify the rating, just based on the stories they see come in, is this a 1 (utterly unredeemable, horribly written), a 10 (publish!) or somewhere between? I'd say a 7 or above is a story you probably read all the way through.

The writer would, in addition to the standard rejection notice, get a readout of the number from each reader who provided one (naturally, the readers' names would be kept off the ratings).

I know journals will never do this, because it opens them up to all kinds of hate from writers. Journals already face occasional anger and bitterness from writers who are certain their stories were better than what got published. A unexpected low rating to go along with it would only fan the flames.

But it would be extremely useful to me, especially when trying to figure out where to go from here with a story I can't just walk away from. I know the number would be something the reader spent two seconds assigning, but that's actually useful, since the up/down decision also happens nearly as quickly. It's not the same as criticism: that requires a full reading every time, no matter how bad it seems. It's just a quick, first-number-that-pops-into-your-head reading of how close a reader was to yes.

As much as I doubt any journal would ever try this, I think it'd be a really interesting experiment for one to try for a single reading period.

Agent disappointment

Trying to get something you've written and care about published has some incredible lows. Last weekend, I decided to quit messing around and send query letters out to agents for my novel. I've sent some, but got discouraged and sort of used "waiting to hear back" as a reason to quit writing. Thirty minutes after writing one, an agent responded with "You have my attention," and asking for a PDF of the novel. That was pretty exciting.

The idea often strikes me that this novel is the main reason I was put on Earth, and that I have a responsibility to try to get it out there. (I also often dismiss this as magical thinking and tell myself I should grow up, suck up more at work, and then go fix the weed whacker.)

I got this response today from that agent:

Jake, I’ve read half your novel, and there’s so much to love. You’re really funny, and I’m fascinated by this look into ((the)) culture ((of the place where I work)). And what you’ve done with the...worldbuilding (I HATE that word but I’m using it anyway) is rather impressive. However, I’m struggling to find the takeaway. It’s clever and you’re obviously talented, but I’m not finding the depth or layers necessary needed for me to feel the satire is working at the level it has to in order succeed in this tough literary fiction arena.

Thanks for sharing this with me, Jake. I appreciated the chance to consider. Best of luck to you!

For like thirty seconds, I thought I'd found an agent, and was on my way to getting this book published.  Getting the agent seems to be the biggest of the hurdles. This was the first time I'd even gotten one to pay attention enough to ask for the manuscript, although I felt like the premise was at least compelling enough I thought I'd get a lot more knee-jerk interest. 

It's a really kind, decent email, and I can't say a thing bad about the agent. He was incredibly fast and sympathetic and seemed to get it. He's in a tough business where you have to make quick decisions about what you think you can sell. I get it. I make quick decisions all the time at the magazine about what I think we should publish and what we shouldn't. I totally understand. Still sucks for me.

I'm really not the kind of person who just brushes off setbacks. I can't even think about another query letter right now. There was a time in my life when I had put writing away, embraced bourgeois normalcy, and felt rather content. Why did I ever start writing again and ruin that tenuous balance that only holds if you don't ask questions of it? I'm much less happy now than I was five years ago. Common sense would seem to dictate that if something is making you unhappy, you should quit doing it, but every time I try, I end up back at the computer trying to write that one more story or try one last place to submit something. 

I am so tired of being good but not good enough. 

 

You can't win if you don't play. Also, you probably can't win.

Way back when I first started sending in stories to see if I could get them published, I saw an off-handed comment somewhere on the Internet that went something like this: "Famous Author X thinks it's weak to always submit to places with a high chance of publication. You should go for the big game." That probably slowed me down to getting my first publication considerably. I really wasted a lot of time only sending in to magazines like The Atlantic. Eventually, I adjusted, and soon my fourth story will be published, followed soon after by the promised book of short stories from Washington Writers' Publishing House.

Still, I can't get over the lure of the big boys. How great would it be to get published by Glimmer Train or New England Review or Prairie Schooner? Wouldn't it bring instant gravitas when I submit further work in the future? Wouldn't it give me a leg up searching for agents for my novel?

I wrote a couple of stories earlier this year that I regard as the best I've done yet. I decided to try to shoot the moon and go for some of the big boys I've been avoiding. The rejections are just starting to come in now. You'd think it would be easier to take a rejection from a top-tier journal, but it's not. I can't help but getting excited when there's a response from a publisher that could really bring a breakthrough. That means the let-down hits me a little bit harder. If you get a rejection from a smaller press, there's always the chance your story was actually good but they're just too overworked to notice. With the top presses, a rejection feels more authoritative.

Also, one journal has a mean form rejection letter. Instead of the many formulas for "we're not saying it's bad, only that we're not publishing it," this one said "Unfortunately, it's not for us." That sounds like something I'd say about jello with pineapple in it.

I've read a lot of writers use the strategy of going big then going small. Try a story out with the big guys, then go for something more approachable. If that fails, maybe rework the story or put it away for a while. That makes sense, but it's a frustratingly slow way to do business. Getting published is like playing a really tough boss level of a video game, only there is a three-to-six month lag between trying something and seeing whether it worked or you have to hit re-start.

I'm happy getting published by smaller presses. It's really enough that anyone reads something I've written and likes it. But 2017 was supposed to be a year that gave me some clarity on how much effort to keep putting into writing, and for how much longer. It started off with a bang, a quick acceptance and then the big news of the book. I really wanted a second big breakthrough with a major journal, but now that very effort has got me back to feeling like I'm grinding in vain. With odds this big, it really feels like I'm waiting for that unreliable girl to show up for our date, and she's an hour and half late, and everyone in the restaurant is starting to feel sorry for me.

The human fallibility of literary journal editors

I'm into month five of my stint at a small-to-mid-sized literary journal. I just met the other readers a few nights ago. I realized that we informally call ourselves "readers," but the journal itself calls us "editors," so I am now, technically, permitted to refer to myself as an "editor." I demand respect now.

I realized something just yesterday as I was taking a few hours to try to help us catch up on the backlog. I have a few informal rules I've adopted without really saying I've adopted them. One is that I vote more leniently when I'm the first person to vote on a story. We generally have a "two no votes and it's out" rule. It seems to me, though, that when someone votes no in the first place, the story is more likely to get a second no and be gone. Maybe this is just because stories that get one no vote probably deserved a second, but I feel like even knowing that a story has been down-voted going in changes the perception of the editor. So I tend to up-vote more when I've gotten there first.

A more troubling tendency

In baseball, it's been known for some time now that umpires unconsciously shade their decision-making on calling balls and strikes. Among the biases: umpires are more likely to call a pitch a strike on a 3-0 count, less likely to call a strike on a batter with two strikes, and will sometimes show a "one-for-them, one-for-the-other-guys" tendency on close pitches.

Similar to the last of these biases, I've noticed that if I just upvoted a story, I am biased against upvoting the one right after it. Maybe I don't want to appear to the other editors like I'm too easy. Maybe I just think it's unlikely that lightning will strike twice in a row. Yesterday, I had two stories back-to-back and I wanted to give both an upvote. But I hesitated to do that, because it felt--on some completely bogus subjective level that I made up--to discredit me.

The moral is to take it easy on yourself when you get rejected

Umpires are slowly improving their biases with the help of highly accurate measurements of balls and strikes. (Many people, myself included, think Major League Baseball should just use the computer to call balls and strikes and take the human element out altogether.) Human literary editors may or may not be aware of their own biases. But we're humans, so we're full of them, including ones we might not be aware of. There is no computer-generated system we can use to show us where we're wrong.

Rejection is possibly the most common subject I come back to on this blog, and there's a reason. Since I found out I have a book coming out, I've had half a dozen rejections. They hurt nearly as much as they did three years ago. I don't know why it hurts, when I'm now watching the sausage get made and realize even more how imperfect decisions are. It just does.

Every writing blog or book of writing advice will tell you not to take rejection hard. It's cheap advice, but it's very hard advice to accept. "There was never yet philosopher that could endure the toothache patiently," Leonato put it in Much Ado About Nothing. Knowing something is so doesn't make it easy to accept it emotionally, especially when you've put so much work into writing something and get only an impersonal "no."

But maybe if you hear a truth enough times, you do start to internalize it, even if you don't want to. I am hereby adding by one to the number of times you've heard it, getting you that much closer to whatever that magic number is.

ARRRRRRRRGHHHH

(He must have died while dictating it.)

A really, really nice rejection note I got today on a story I really, really cared about. For no particular reason, I will take the name of the journal out.:

Thank you so much for submitting "Savage, Maryland" to ______. Though the piece received many favorable comments, it was not selected for publication in the upcoming issue. However, we all admire your writing and sincerely hope you will submit to future volumes. On a personal note, I once lived in Howard County (western side—Highland/Fulton) and have been on the quarry trails, so your piece was especially evocative to me. You drew this setting beautifully.

God. Damn. It. It's a really nice note, and with that level of specificity, there's no chance this is a "fake personal rejection." They really liked it. They just had more good stuff than they could fit. Fuck me.

It occurs to me that one thing that compelled me to start writing again was that I had some things inside of me I really had to get out. But I don't want to just put them on a page for my own personal catharsis. I want to share them, because some of them I really love. I want to give them away. That's how I felt about "American as Berbere," the one that did get published. There are a few more I really love and just want to find an audience. This is my third "encouraging rejection" in three months. I should be encouraged, but right now I just feel empty. If I am making pro-cons lists of whether to keep up this effort of writing, this deflated feeling right now of almost having found a home for this story is in the con column. I am not an indefatigably chipper person. If you tell me no enough times, I will stop asking. I'm really low right now. Which is not how I should feel after someone just said such really nice things about a story I wrote. Shit.