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I hit a strange milestone recently. This is both the most stories I have had out on submission and the longest I have had multiple stories out on submission.

Let’s be completely honest, most, if not all, of them will be rejected. Now that’s not a defeatist attitude, that’s just the way this game goes. Most stories get rejected. Sometimes several times.

Maybe that means the story isn’t good. But maybe not, maybe it just means that the publisher had a similar story already, or that they don’t like that sort of thing, or that they have a specific theme they are going for in this issue and that particular story doesn’t match. Maybe they were just having a bad day and wanted to take it out on that story… who knows. Not really my business to know, and my job isn’t to cater to the whims of someone that I don’t know and may never meet. My job is to write these stories as well as I can and try to sell them.

That’s why this is an interesting milestone. As soon as any one of these stories is rejected, I actually have somewhere lined up to send it next. That’s a different thing for me. Typically I have one or two stories ready and I either have nowhere to send them, or they are already sold and I have nothing else in my back pocket to follow it up with.

I don’t know if I will ever sell any of these stories, but as long as I don’t suddenly sell all of them (a very unlikely eventuality) I will spend the next half year or more with at least one story out on submission. And I think that’s kind of a neat step in the right direction.