Got my thirteen hundredth short story rejection

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I normally keep very close tabs on how many short story rejections I have, but this one slipped past me. I just happened to notice it when I was glancing at my spreadsheet. Mostly, this is because I’m not really focused on short stories anymore. I have so many unrevised stories left over from my MFA program that it almost seems pointless to write new ones. And, at the same time, I’ve been finding that novel-writing is taking much longer and using much more of my brain than it used to. And, finally, I’ve been having a bear of a time writing anything science-fictional and, actually, have not been able to complete a work of SF since this time last year.

But I do still go through submission sprees (I currently have 47 submissions out), and I am still happy when I sell a story.

Since my last rejection centennial, I have (I believe) sold three stories. One to Clarkesworld. One to the literary magazine Birkensnake. And another, still forthcoming, to the Indiana Review. All told, I am pleased with all of these, but I am probably most pleased with the Indiana Review, since that’s not only my most formally atypical story (it’s told in the form of a time-usage chart) but it’s also fulfills my long-standing desire to have a story in a [Place Name] Review.

As always, previous rejection milestones are listed below:

As you can see, this represents a severe slackening of rejection pace. One that’s due, almost entirely, to a smaller submissions volume. A large part of that is because I trunked about twenty stories that I’d been submitting for awhile (some of them as old as four years ago) which I could no longer really stand behind.

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  1. Sonia Lal

    That’s a lot of rejections!

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