I’d planned on zipping over to this blog the moment I received my thousandth short story rejection notice. A thousand is a nice round number. And I figured you’d want to know without delay. Today that notice came in.
But something cropped up. The doorbell rang. Delivery. We have to get everything delivered during lockdown. Then the kids want cups of water, or biscuits. This and that; you know how it is.
I come back to my computer to find another rejection note. Then, what do you know, another arrives. I feel terrible for this, but we overshot. I cannot report to you that I’ve reached a thousand rejections, because I’ve reached a thousand and two. Not at all a nice round number.
(Unless you think taking two and multiplying three and then multiplying 167 (a prime number) is numerically elegant.)
I’m terribly sorry this has happened. For your sake. I owed you this, and I need to do better. And I will do better.
Now, mind you, as sorry as I feel for you, I feel nothing but positivity toward myself. I don’t whatsoever feel that the overwhelming number of rejections I’ve received since beginning to submit short fiction in mid 2019 implies everything I write is self-indulgent junk. Nor do I doubt whether I’ve been going about this process all wrong, wasting a lot of poor editors’ time. I have no thoughts of quitting, no dejected moments of self-scorn. I see no connexion between my failures in writing and my more general failure from childhood onward to ever get on quite the same wavelength as another human.
Nope. Bursting with positivity here.
So, onward and upward, from this thousand to many thousands more. And I won’t let you down again.