![\"Storu](\"http:\/\/www.dresan.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/Storu-Acceptances-v1.png\")
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Recently I wrote an essay about my writing. In it, in short, I said I used to submit a lot of short stories for publication, but then I got discouraged when they were almost all rejected, and ultimately stopped sending stories out completely. However, once I started sending stories out again, I started to sell stories again – so there was no use in getting discouraged.<\/p>\n
That’s a nice little story, but even as I wrote it, I knew that story might be wrong \u2013 my data was clustered by stories in the order they were written, not by date of sales, so by necessity it caps my submission rate at the rate at which I wrote stories. I suspected that real chronological data might be even more spiky, with several stories being written and sent out in one year. As it turns out, I keep great records – all my rejection slips, spreadsheets of date sent, meticulous notes on submissions and magazine closures – and when I dug further into the data, I found that my story was wrong in ways that I didn’t expect.<\/p>\n
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First, I never<\/b> stopped sending stories that I’d written. With rare exceptions of stories I couldn\u2019t take from first draft to salable product, every single story I wrote, I sent out. No, even that’s not quite right. One story I didn\u2019t send out at all after a particularly nasty review from a friend to whom I never send stories anymore. Other people loved the story and were \u201chaunted\u201d by it and said I should send it out. But the point being, most of the stories I thought<\/b> I had never sent out actually got sent to many places.<\/p>\n
Second, my story sending was even spikier than I thought \u2013 1990 to 1998, with a spike in 2001 to 2002, not resuming until 2011; you can see this in the chart above. Now, there are lulls in there where stories didn’t get sent \u2026 but since I have records of sending out almost every story that I wrote, this sounds like I stopped writing<\/b> stories, not stopped sending them. And that actually is true: when I joined a dot.com startup, I was largely too busy to write short stories, and I quit for a while again after my father and grandmother died \u2026 shifting gears instead to novels, of which the first one that I finished became my first novel published.<\/p>\n
Third, and worst of all \u2026 I thought I wasn\u2019t getting sales of my early stories because editors thought those stories sucked, but actually, editors seemed to love them. Excluding a Lovecraft pastiche, even the very first story that I widely circulated, \u201cCommon Ground,\u201d got some very positive feedback. And I don\u2019t mean just encouraging rejections \u2013 I mean people who wrote \u201cGreat story! Unfortunately, our magazine is shutting down and we\u2019ll have to return it.\u201d In fact, several magazines responded with \u201cwe\u2019re out of business\u201d letters – and most of the magazines I sent those early stories to have since shut down. So maybe I had the kiss of death, but I sure seemed to be doing something that attracted people’s personal attention.<\/p>\n
So I was right to say that there was no point in being discouraged – but my picture of events was even worse than I thought. I have more thoughts about constructing and deconstructing your own personal myths \u2026 but for now, let me just say: check your assumptions.<\/b> For those of us who are hard on ourselves, it’s all too easy to take a little rejection and turn it into giant discouragement. The reality is, even if things look bad, you might find a glimmer of hope \u2026 even in a rejection pile.<\/p>\n
-the Centaur<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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