Acceptance, Rejection, and Ghosting: The End of Year Writing Stats

Acceptance, Rejection, and Ghosting: The End of Year Writing Stats

Dang, the ghosting feels bad. I know it's them, not me. Still, there's a weird combination of mostly "Get your shit together editors—it's Submittable and all you have to do is press the reject button" along with a thin emotional layer of "Is my writing so cringy that you had to turn away?" Anyway, I had three ghostings from book publishers and one from a journal. And yes, this was despite sending a polite nudge of an email to each.

These days part of me doesn't want to leave home what with an aging dog, less willingness to deal with air travel, and that particular tenderness that comes to a couple after a health scare. Four residency rejections meant I didn't have to decide. There's another that's been outstanding for long enough that I'm close to declaring it another ghosting.

Journals dealt out twenty rejections and one acceptance. Nine of these were the encouraging/exasperating "close but no cigar" rejections mostly for the batch of fantastical stories I've been sending around. And the acceptance was to Cossmass Infinities which publishes science fiction and fantasy short stories. And it paid enough that I became eligible to join the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association. Which I did the moment the payment arrived. This has long been a goal of mine!

Too late to include in last year's tally, it was December 19th of 2022 when I signed a contract with the University of Georgia Press for an essay collection. My Withered Legs and Other Essays comes out March 1, 2024! That was a fine way to end a year. (And pettily, I have to mention that this makes up for the two presses that ghosted the manuscript.)

But most of my writing this year has been self-published on Substack. I finished up the serialization of The Sacrifice Zone: An Environmental Thriller and later published it as an eBook. (Which means you can ask your library to order it on Libby.) And I posted thirteen essays on Substack. Most of them are writings about writing and others are about travel and aging and disability and queerness. I was rereading "Creative Mortification" this morning. It mentions my recent unsettling and embarrassing tendency to praise my own writing sometimes out loud and in public. Sheesh. Nevertheless, here I go again.

I love these essays I write for Substack. They are fun to create and more spontaneous and meandering and emotional than my usual wont. And after years of equating discipline and focus to good writing, these essays mostly get started the morning after I take one of my good pain pills the night before. So besides a rare solid night of sleep, my body is still at ease and I'm still a little high. The my-father-was-a-drill-sergeant approach to writing continues to be of use, but I sure can recommend the stoned-giggly-and-in-less-pain method. I should offer classes in this technique to those of us with chronic pain. We could all take our preferred drug and then meet up on Zoom.      

Anyway, Happy New Year from the Gregorian calendar!

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