Friday, April 18, 2008

Ouch

Perhaps I was starting to get cocky and whatever deity controls the karmic balance of the universe decided to bitch-slap me back to reality, but today's mail brought an unexpected mountain of bad news. I received four rejections.

It's been a long, long time since I received four rejections in a single day. In fact, I haven't even received four rejections in the same month since May of last year when I received five.

If ever there was a day made for crawling into bed and pulling the covers over my head, this is the day.

But hiding from the rejections piled on my desk doesn't make me a better writer, nor will it make me more successful. What will make me a better, more successful writer is a close examination of the stories. Why were they rejected? Is there a problem with the stories, or did I submit them to inappropriate markets?

Maybe I'll seek the answers to those questions tomorrow, after I crawl out from under the covers.

2 comments:

Kevin R. Tipple said...

Any ideas now as to what went wrong?

Michael Bracken said...

Actually, no. I filed all of the rejected manuscripts and it will probably be a while before I examine them closely.