Usually Monday’s are the crappy day of the week, but this week Tuesday decided to stand in for Monday since Monday was a holiday and, thus, enjoyable.
Two rejections. Two. Both for short stories I had submitted, and one of them the aforementioned “Ricky Flies” story that they had liked initially, but on further review decided to take a pass on. The “Monster Under the Bed” fairy tale story I wrote was rejected as well, but luckily Mary put me onto a journal that publishes fairy tale stories and I’ve submitted it to them for their yearly contest. Seems like a good place for those types of stories to go and I wish I had known about it before I put “Jack Nory” online, I’d have liked to submit that piece to them as well.
Needless to say I felt a bit… off, shall we say?… today because of the double whammy. I’ve had a good run this year so far, and I’m closing out May with 170,000 words of new prose under the belt, but I can’t help but feel a little bit down because of the lack of progress in selling anything. Perfectly normal of course, and lots of writers go through worse so I have no complaints at all. I’m reminding myself its a business and this is the business side of things. Still, it does make me question a little the goals I’ve been trying to achieve and reduces my motivation to push hard for them.
So, to sum up the May totals: 33,527 words written, 1082 words per day average, and only two days with no writing. Not quite up to the level of April, but not bad really and still making good steady progress. As I mentioned, I’ve reached 170,004 words for the year, almost 25,000 words over the set goal for this point in the year, and a bank of 25 days to “vacation” with (ie, not write). I think moving through the summer I’m going to put more focus into editing the detective novel so I can get that done and start resubmitting, and I’ll be focusing on the novels for the time being. I currently have seven stories pretty much complete and zero sales to show for 21 submissions. I have another one I’m working on I’ll probably finish up, and then we’ll see if I return to them at all during the year. With multiple novels to focus on, there might not be a motivation to do so.
Then again, a double whammy of novel rejections might have been worse, so…
Oh well, this, too, shall pass. Here comes June. I’m almost halfway to my goal for the year, and should be there in the next few days. I’ll throw myself a little celebration, and I’ll make sure it’s on a Saturday, not a Tuesday.