Aiming for rejections?

gettingby

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When I was really playing the short story game, I did the "new story every week" approach. Which meant that there were points I had dozens of things making the rounds. (Individual pieces ranges from micro/Twitter fiction to novelettes.) There are not a lot of pro-paying markets (relatively speaking) in my genre (SF/F/H) but there are a lot of semi-pro markets. I had one story that gathered nearly 30 rejections alone (over about a year and a half) so it would not surprise me to see someone who was writing shorts all the time and subbing them consistently get 100-200 rejections in a year.

I also know that pushing myself to keep things out on submission was more helpful than not. But I also have done a reasonably good job of separating my work from my sense of self, and learned the idea that rejections are a part of the process much like editing or revising. Obviously, YMMV.

I also did the story a week thing for a good year, but I didn't even hear back from some of those places that same calendar year. And I wasn't the best at keeping all my stories on submission. I'm trying to be better about that. You would need to average two to four rejections a week to rack up rejection numbers like these. That also means sending that many things out a week or more if you wanted to hear back before the year ended. Or maybe you can count the rejections that come in for things you sent prior to counting rejections. And speaking of counting rejections, I checked on duotrope, and I'm already up to 50 rejections for the last 12 months. That's more than I thought I had. A little discouraging. I don't really want to get 50 more rejections or 150. Rejection gets to me. I try not to let it, but it does.