At long last, the rejection came in for that story I eventually inquired on. I’m not surprised that it was rejected. The surprise would be actually selling a story at this point. I know I have to improve as a writer, but I also have to consider that what I write, my style, isn’t what the editors of the magazines that I’ve been submitting to are looking for. That doesn’t make the stories bad, necessarily.
Of course, I do need to continue to get stories out for sale, and to write stories. I haven’t been devoting time to writing because of prep for my solo trip the first week of May and because there’s a lot going on at work. Busy at work is better than bored at work, but I’d like to find a happy medium some day.
I’m glad that I didn’t have as much of an emotional reaction to the rejection as I usually do. My skin must be thickening up. I mean, I did have hope for this one. From another magazine, it actually got a personal rejection instead of a form letter. So there was something to it that appealed to more than just me.
I’m letting what I learned in the depth workshop percolate, but I need to get some practice in as well. There’s a story that I started before the workshop and then started tearing up because I thought I’d written past the ending. I want to go back and re-do the beginning with better depth and then figure out the ending and be done with it, though I haven’t a clue what market it would be good for. I might just publish it standalone for sale and see how that goes. But it needs to be finished first. And I have the starts from the depth workshop to continue off on.
After my solo trip, I need to get back to writing, back to the challenge. 600 words a day from May 8 through September 8, 300 on backpacking days. I know I can write that much or more in a day if I carve out the time for it. So I will.