Woman of Letters

Got my 1600th short story rejection

The other day I got my 1600th short story rejection. It’s taken me a very long time! I used to rack up a hundred rejections in nine months or so. But I see that I logged my 1500th more than two years ago! I know, I’m such a slacker. It wouldn’t have happened at all if I hadn’t decided to do some more submissions to literary journals. Since you can simultaneously submit, it’s easy to get a lot of rejections in a short time.

In the last 100 rejections I’ve sold five stories, including my first two sales to the “Big Three” (the remaining science fiction and fantasy paper digests): “Bodythoughts” to F&SF and “The Intertidal Zone” to Asimov’s. I’ve also sold a solicited story to A Thousand Beginnings and Endings, and I’ve sold stories to Lightspeed and to Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Not a terrible haul, especially considering I haven’t written many stories in the past two years.

Lately I’ve gotten back into writing short stories as well. It’s sort of come out of a sense of play. It’s a little hard to feel a sense of play when writing a novel. That’s for many reason. There’s the length of time involved (you have to write this thing day after day, whether you want to or not). There’s the high stakes (your career hangs in the balance). But, most of all, there’s simply the rigidity of the form. Novels live or die based on their structure. And once you’ve begun a book, the process of writing is largely the process of finding its ideal structure. It’s not really a process of discovery, more it’s a process of trying to see the things you have to do in order for it to work. With short stories, it’s a lot easier to just start writing and see what’ll happen. It’s fun.

The process of submitting is also a game. It’s fun to send things out and see what’ll happen. When I was younger I used to live or die on the basis of the responses to my stories. Now I care a lot less. It’s simply not very important. When the story is published, it tends to sink without a trace, so what does it matter whether it gets published or not? It’s a very inside-baseball sort of thing. You want to publish in Asimov’s for the benefit of the few hundred people who might be impressed. You want to send Charlie Finlay a story he’ll like. So you keep trying. But it’s not a very high stakes game.

I was reading a book lately, Overwhelmed by Brigid Schulte, which is part of the genre of pop nonfiction books about how moms are overwhelmed nowadays and have a really difficult time. The book was only okay, but it contained a large section on ‘play’ and on the idea that adults have no time to play.

My mind immediately leapt to computer and video games, of course, which constituted most of my play as a kid. But more, I thought about imaginative play. I thought about all the little daydreams I had as a kid, and the ways I would enact those daydreams. For instance I remember spending days creating my own utility belt, full of odds and ends, that I’d use in case of emergency.

To my mind, it’s not that adults don’t play, it’s that adults just play so much more seriously. When an adult rearranges their closets, that’s a form of play. It’s a deeply satisfying endeavor, and it’s part of a process of reimagining your own life. When a child plays, they dream the impossible, but when an adult plays, there’s always a desire to turn that dream into a reality. I would hesitate to say that writing is a form of play. It’s sometimes struck me that I could write literally anything. I could write an entire novel about being a gaseous being who’s stuck in an unhappy tripartite marriage with a black hole and a neutron star. But I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to just jazz around. I want to write the things only I can write.

But, as opposed to the writing, the career stuff–the marketing and the submitting and the maneuvering–all seems to me very playful, in that you try out a lot of things, and maybe some of it works and some of it doesn’t, and in the end it’s pretty much all doomed to failure, but hopefully you have fun along the way.

As always, here’s a list of my previous rejection milestone posts!

Comments (

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  1. disperser

    Interesting . . . I have 48 rejections. Probably won’t add any in the near term as there’s nothing out now.

    The thing is, I have specific markets I’m concentrating on and there’s only eight of them. Given I have six short stories meeting the submission requirements, I’ve exhausted the markets until I write more short stories.

    To be sure, I have lots of material I could submit . . . but since I posted it on my blog, it all qualifies as having already been published and thus not eligible for submission.

    Then again, my goal is only 837 rejections, so I can afford taking my sweet time . . . unless I get diagnosed with some incurable disease in which case I’ll be scrambling to meet my goal.

    Anyway, an impressive number.

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