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:
- 300 – August 8, 2008 (401 days to next milestone)
- 400 – September 13, 2009 (282 days to next milestone)
- 500 – June 22, 2010 (268 days to next milestone)
- 600 – March 17, 2011 (208 days to next milestone)
- 700 – October 11, 2011 (185 days to next milestone)
- 800 – April 17, 2012 (197 days to next milestone)
- 900 – October 31, 2012 (173 days to next milestone)
- 1000 – April 25th, 2013 (198 days to next milestone)
- 1100 – November 10th, 2013 (111 days to next milestone)
- 1200 – March 1st, 2014 (268 days to current milestone)
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.