A Writer's Notebook, Day Eight-Hundred-And--Fifty-One

The hundredth rejection arrived, as expected.  I suppose it is better to not be sitting, waiting, though there is far more work that I have not heard back on yet.  It does feel significant, but I also am aware that it means nothing, in some sense.  I do not believe that most journals are biased in accepting work from writers who have been widely rejected, or that this sort of rejection accumulates in a literal way.  At the same time, if one is to say that the issue is purely about luck, as many do, I have to wonder about the odds,.  I feel it is quite abnormal to have this degree of difficulty breaking through.  I have looked into the averages for rejections and acceptances, but finding information on this specific aspect is not easy.  I know that many writers have severe difficult getting an agent, but that is a different issue than getting work accepted by journals.  I just want to have concrete evidence that I am progressing and not just accumulating an increasing, and ultimately endless, stream of rejections.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What is this whole blog thing for anyway?

I am starting this because I said I would.  My friend Tim persuaded me, and that was probably a far more difficult and complicated maneuver on his part, that I should start this blog, and I made a commitment that I would, so here I am.  Which gives a reason for why this blog exists, but not really much of a purpose for that to lend meaning to that existence, which makes it like a lot of us, I suppose.  Of course, there are two purposes to this exercise, though there might only be one at a time, as they are largely about perspective, I think.  For instance, right now, a large part of the purpose, for me, is to have the commitment of adding to this blog consistently, as a matter of building the habit of working more steadily.  I have built that habit before, but it has always been intermittent, largely driven by situational demands.  In college, many years ago, I wrote daily, because I had an audience and because I was in classes that I felt committed to wr...
Read more

Part Three Is Coming

I want to apologize for the lateness of my post today.  Last night, I was out of town and only arrived home this afternoon.  It being a quick trip,. I decided not to bring a computer and to do my work when I arrived home, so I will be reading the next chapter and writing today's post shortly. While I am on here, though, I wanted to return, momentarily to questions I raised earlier.  One issue that I hadn't mentioned, although it is something that I have wrestled with previously, concerning the personal, is that I am not entirely comfortable speaking about third parties that I personally know in the context of written work.  This is largely because those people are not present as I am communicating, and they have not given any actual permission for me to discuss them.  That having  been said, I do feel a bit of leeway about telling things of myself.  For example. I feel very strange about yesterday, as it was Friday the 13th and I had a number of un...
Read more

Poem: Is He Gone, Now

Is He Gone, Now? Maybe he is just there, just where I can't see from here, around a corner or behind a car or anyplace so close but not observable from here. It would be nice to go, to get up and walk off, but if he is not gone, if he is there waiting? No, that is no good at all.
Read more