I’ve spent the time since my last post (which I was surprised to see was a year and a half ago) slowly ramping up my submissions and beginning to produce new short stories. So far in 2024 I’ve made 25 submissions (which is one less than I made in all of 2019, the last year in which I was doing a lot of writing and submitting), with five new original stories making their way into the submission cycle. (I’m also submitting some of my reprints.) Of those five stories, two I completed and started submitting for the first time in 2024, and three are significant re-writes of things I’d been submitting back before the pandemic.
Last week I got my first acceptance since 2021, for one of the two new stories. It’s amazing the boost of confidence that comes with that acceptance email — now I feel sanguine about rejections, knowing I haven’t lost my touch in the last few years. I’m pretty good about rejection; in my day job, as a litigator, you have to accept that you’re going to lose a lot of the time, and that losing (or winning) doesn’t actually speak to the quality of the work you’ve done. Even the best possible pleadings and oral argument may get you nowhere, because the law or the facts can be against you, the judge can have a certain approach to the law that doesn’t favour you, and so on. I’ve done some of my best work on cases that I went on to lose, and I just have to accept that or I won’t be able to move on to the next case. But even knowing that short story submissions are the same (the story isn’t a great fit for the magazine’s tone, the editor has already accepted something similar, the editor just doesn’t like [time travel, ghosts, time travelling ghosts, insert whatever the story is about], the story’s long and they can buy two shorter stories for the same cost), it can be hard to get rejection after rejection. I think there are less markets doing personal rejections than there were when I first started submitting — and maybe just less markets, too, so that the competition for any given submission period is fierce. It can be draining.
But now I’ve got that acceptance under my belt. (More information to follow on that when the magazine announces publicly.) And I’m aiming to make at least 50 submissions this year, and with one of the new stories now out of commission due to the acceptance, I’ll need to get cracking on writing a few more. Hope to have more good news soon.