In Honor of my 50th Rejection from a Major Spec Magazine

Earlier this week, I was rejected by Fantasy & Science Fiction Magazine for the 50th time.

Truthfully, I'm not sure if this qualifies as "impressive." Most people would have given up by now, I imagine; some don't, and never will, content to smash their skulls against that particular wall until there's nothing left but fragments. Others, I must assume, are far more reasonable.

So which kind of person am I? Let's figure it out together. Take that 50 rejections from F&SF and add the following:

1. That 50th rejection from F&SF was my 940th rejection overall since February 2017.
2. There are several other publications that are running close in the rejection count. I'm at 48 rejections from Flash Fiction Online, and 45 from Clarkesworld.
3. Next month, when the timeout counter ends, I'll be sending more material to F&SF.

The answer, then, is "Ow, my head hurts. Why isn't this wall down yet?"

In terms of whether I actually deserve to get into F&SF - an old, well-respected and important market for speculative fiction - I'll leave that up to you. "Distance is a Fallacy"? F&SF rejected this one was on January 12, 2018. "The Hermit and the Songbird"? Swatted down July 17, 2017. They gave the axe to "The Path in the Dragon's Wake" on April 29, 2019, pulled the plug on "Early Voting" on December 18, 2018, and...you get the point, we don't need to dwell.

I bring all of this up so that I can make a few points.

The first point is one that I've made before, including here. Writing on any serious level means dealing with constant rejection, no matter how successful you've been or how good you think you are. One of the reason I can be so short with all of those people convinced that the world wants to steal their books is because all of them seem to imagine that this is easy, or fast, or a sure thing. It's none of those.

Working in this space means understanding the long odds. It means putting the bright-sider rhetoric in a more realistic context and acknowledging that no, you're probably not going to be a bestseller and the world doesn't need your novel. It also means finding some way to cope with that rejection. If you run back to your writing circle for comfort every time an agent turns you down, that's all you'll ever do with your time. You need to have a callus against these things, know how to shrug them off and try again.

You also might need to know when it's not worth trying again - and this leads me to my second point.

That 50th story that F&SF turned down was called "Doomsday is a Loaded Die," and it was one of the stories from the This Somber Road collection that I shared earlier this month. I read back over it, and - all egotism aside - it's one of the best pieces I've ever done. That's not for nothing, as I spent weeks on this and all of the other This Somber Road stories to make sure that it had style to go along with the substance.

Yet no one wanted it - not F&SF or the other half-dozen spec publications I shopped it to. And when your best work goes down that hard, it might be time to pack it in.

Those same bright-sider articles will tell you that quitting is loser talk - you only fail when you quit and all of that. This is terrible advice - the sunken cost fallacy given a veneer of positivity. Chasing a futile dream means turning away from other paths that might ultimately be better for you.

Look, I've been reading these same short stories since I was a child, since I was slipping through the library stacks with Bradbury collections. If there is any space I should know, it's speculative fiction - and yet it seems that I don't. Maybe I just came along at the wrong time and what I do isn't "in" anymore. Maybe it's all nepotism - and given some of the pieces I've seen published, I'm open to that possibility. Maybe I just plain don't get it.

In any case, I have to acknowledge the possibility - as does any writer if he's honest with himself - that this is a far as I can get in this field, and I should consider finding another. True, this means starting over after more than four years and three dozen publication credits. And yes, I'm going to finish submitting "Doomsday is a Loaded Die" and the other This Somber Road stories on my march toward 1000 rejections - hey, I put in the work, I should at least roll the dice. But in the end, it's about time to find a new highway.

Turning away is hard, but sometimes you have to turn to find the sun.