Breakthrough!

You may recall that several weeks ago I had a story rejected by the Magazine of Sci Fi/Fantasy. Well, I overcame my self-loathing and sent it out again, and last night I opened my email to find an acceptance! This is my first short story acceptance, so I’m pretty tickled.

Here is my testimony to all aspiring writers. If your story gets rejected, there may not be anything wrong with it at all. When you think you’re done with it, when you’ve taken into account the differing perspectives of your critique partners, sifted out what is useful from what is not, and incorporated them…then it’s time to have faith in yourself, and in the story you have to tell to the world.

Don Music

There’s a clip on an old Sesame Street video that we’ve been watching with Alex. In it, Don Music is sitting at the piano, trying to write “Mary had a little lamb.”

“Mary had a little lamb whose fleece was white as snow,
And everywhere that Mary went, the lamb was sure to…to…to…”

With a deafening cluster chord, Don Music flings his head down on the keyboard and wails, “Oh, I’ll NEVER get it!”

Every time he sees this, Christian roars with laughter. Then he turns to me and says, “Look! It’s Kate!”

Fine. I have a melodramatic side. So sue me.

I got my second short story rejection in two weeks yesterday. And although I’m considerably more mature about it than Don Music, I am fighting the same voice of gloom and doom. It’s ridiculous, but it’s true. The process of breaking into the fiction market seems so overwhelming. Even more so because “The Beggar’s Queen” was so easy a process. I spend hours doing market research, but what I end up doing is ruling out every single magazine, because none of them have already published a story about a farm wife who chases a rooster in the middle of the night. And of course, if they had published it, it would still be pointless to send it, because why would they want two?

In a day or two I’ll set aside my self-loathing and I’ll send it out again.

Unless I decide to do a major rewrite, of course.