Rejection

Today I got a rejection letter for The Unwanted Callers Of Cthulhu. I think that took about two months, which makes me worried that it could take the whole year to place it correctly; I'm not sure if two months to read an unsolicited story is par for the course or (worst case) that's actually prompt for the industry and rejections often take longer than that to hear about.

I'm a little sad it didn't get accepted, but the rejection letter was polite enough and (I hope) I'm now mature and secure enough not to dissolve into a screeching mess that Demands My Genius Be Recognised. Let's wait for the next rejection before allowing that to happen.

Trying to get something published is a bit like looking for a job: by doing more research on where you apply, you might raise your chances of success. The next thing to do, therefore, isn't just to send it out again, but to think on why it wasn't suitable for that publication, and understand better where it might fit. What I'm not sure is how to go about that. There's a lot of unknown unknowns that I feel might confound me - there may be vast numbers of magazines that I've never even heard of that might be the perfect fit. There's no substitute for good targetting; unfortunately, it means work, which I have to admit to shirking of late.

Still, fail harder, fail better and all that...

I would grumble on about the other rejections I've suffered this year, but they've been assaults only really on my ego. When somebody tells you that you can't have something you didn't really want anyway, you shouldn't get aggravated.

Unfortunately, the operative word is "shouldn't". Hmmph.

This evening, I hosted an event at the office that included me talking about things for 45 minutes, without swearing, falling over or throwing up. So I'm pretty pleased with that. After my act, we ate Pizza Hut pizza, and as that congealed in my gut I had my brain (and my computer) melted by a demonstration of Benford's Law for fraud detection in R. Interesting, but I had that sickly iced-lake feeling of sliding across something I might never grasp. Maybe I just need more sleep...