76. Received 2/2/2016 by Dana Mele
Query
75. Received 3/2/2016 by Dana Mele
Query. 3/4 of the way there. PROBABLY won’t get to 100, but this has been quite a journey. Final countdown is on!
74. Received 9/28/2016 by Dana Mele
73. Received 9/27/2016 by Dana Mele
72. Received 9/26/2016 by Dana Mele
Getting close, but unless I get a slew of rejections soon, I don’t think I’m going to hit 100 by the 100 day mark. I’ve been sending a lot more queries than submissions in the recent past, and many of them won’t receive responses unless there’s interest. But 100 days aren’t quite up yet. I think!
71. Received 9/22/2016 by Dana Mele
70. Received 9/20/2016 by Dana Mele
Killing it today–a short story and a short humor piece I’ve been trying selectively to place for quite a while now. It’s tough because there are very few market where I think it would be a fit. So Shouts and Murmurs isn’t one of them 🙂 Gulp of air. Moving forward!
69. Received 9/19/2016 by Dana Mele
68. Received 9/15/2016 by Dana Mele
Agent query form rejection.
67. Received 9/13/2016 by Dana Mele
Novel query. Form rejection. These are new for me, and do they ever sting. The novel in question, having gone through several incarnations has taken… I’ve lost count, but at least four years to write. My better guess is 5-6. It’s gone through workshopping, beta reading, a consultation with a professional editor, none of which tells me anything really about whether it will sink or swim out there on its own. It’s scary putting it out there in the world. Particularly because this one started out as a completely different project which I wrote, put down, and completely rewrote as something else. I’m much more comfortable with short fiction, and this is a whole new world of rejections for me. Let’s do this thing.
66. Received 9/12/2016 by Dana Mele
Same piece.
65. Received 9/12/2016 by Dana Mele
Sci-fi short.
64. Received 9/8/2016 by Dana Mele
63. Received 8/21/2016 by Dana Mele
Perfect example. I wrote this story years ago and it’s very different from almost everything else I’ve written. It’s longer than anything else, it’s very serious, there’s no element of the extraordinary or odd, and it’s just very sad. I usually don’t love that kind of story, but somehow this one came out of a dream I had and it’s written now, and rewritten too, after I put it aside for a few years. I think there’s a home for it, but I’m not sure where yet.
62. Received 8/19/2016 by Dana Mele
That flash piece again. It seems ill-fated. I’ve been putting this one out there on and off for quite a while now. It may need a significant overhaul. I rarely completely trash a story. Sometimes I let it sit for years, take it out, rewrite it significantly, and emerge with something that works much better. But I don’t torch something I’ve completed. If I’ve seen it through to the ending, it’s worth rescuing. Just maybe not for a while.
61. Received 8/16/2016 by Dana Mele
Well, not blind faith.
60. Received 8/11/2016 by Dana Mele
I still have faith.
59. Received 8/5/2016 by Dana Mele
A quirky extremely dark humor short story I have a lot of faith in.
58. Received 8/3/2016 by Dana Mele
A flash fiction piece
57. Received 7/28/2016 by Dana Mele
Back up. Back up. Back up.
Just because I haven’t been updating for a few weeks doesn’t mean the rejections haven’t been pouring in. Get ready.
56. Received 7/26/2016 by Dana Mele
55. Received 7/24/2016 by Michelle Orabona
A note. At this point, at 50%, I received my first acceptance for this time period. That’s about a 50:1 ratio.
Just something to think about.
-Dana
54. Received 7/24/2016 by Michelle Orabona
53. Received 7/22/2016 by Dana Mele
Poetry. More than halfway there!
52. Received 7/22/2016 by Dana Mele
51. Received 7/22/2016 by Dana Mele
50. Received 7/22/2016 by Dana Mele
49. Received 7/22/2016 by Dana Mele
48. Received 7/22/2016 by Dana Mele
47. Received 7/21/2016 by Michelle Orabona
46. Received 7/19/2016 by Dana Mele
A short story that I wrote a while ago and have recently resurrected.
45. Received 7/18/2016 by Dana Mele
A staff writing job for an online magazine. Should be worth several hundred rejection points, but rules are rules, so it only counts as one. A real setback, but the challenge continues!
44. Received 7/17 by Michelle Orabona
after a very quiet week.
43. Received 7/17/2016 by Dana Mele
42. Received 7/10/2016 by Dana Mele
41. Received 7/10/2016 by Michelle Orabona
40. Received 7/9/2016 by Dana Mele
Damn poetry. 40%.
39. Received 7/9/2016 by Dana Mele
38. Received 7/9/2016 by Dana Mele
37. Received 7/9/2016 by Dana Mele
36. Received 7/9/2016 by Dana Mele
35. Received 7/9/2016 by Dana Mele
34. Received 7/7/2016 by Michelle Orabona
Submitted and rejected on the same day. If a journal doesn’t want my work I like to know about it quickly. I’d rather get an acceptance though. Being the first of my rejections for this challenge (believe me, there are plenty more behind me) it still stung a bit but I’m trying to get on board the rejection train and be excited about putting my work out there more!
-Michelle
Woo! Together we will crush this!
-Dana
33. Received 7/6/2016 by Dana Mele
Poems. One-third of the way there.
32. Received 7/6/2016 by Dana Mele
31. Received 7/6/2016 by Dana Mele
30. Received 7/6/2016 by Dana Mele
29. Received 7/6/2016 by Dana Mele
28. Received 7/6/2016 by Dana Mele
Five poems, received just after midnight. It’s my son’s birthday, so I won’t devote much time to these ones. Passed the quarter mark, though. In less than one week.
27. Received 7/6/2016 by Dana Mele
26. Received 7/6/2016 by Dana Mele
25. Received 7/6/2016 by Dana Mele
24. Received 7/6/2016 by Dana Mele
23. Received 7/5/2016 by Dana Mele
Three poems, rejected. My previous comment about choosing markets made me think about what factors go into choosing publications to submit my work to. After gathering a list of publications I think would be right for the piece and vice versa from an aesthetic and content perspective, I generally don’t submit to a market that has an acceptance rate too far below what I think is in my reach for a certain piece. Of course there’s absolutely no way to know. But you can make an educated guess. And I hesitate to submit to a market that doesn’t take simultaneous submissions unless they have a somewhat reasonable response time and respond to all submissions. So I have to amend the previous statement that I didn’t take response rate into account at all for any fiction or nonfiction pieces. Rather, I take response rate into account for pieces I’m submitted to markets that don’t take simsubs. In that case, response time definitely plays a role. Especially if I’ve identified several potential markets for the piece and one or more of them have submission deadlines in the near future.
22. Received 7/5/2016 by Dana Mele
21. Received 7/5/2016 by Dana Mele
20. Received 7/3/2016 by Dana Mele
Make that 20%. I swear I’m not cheating. But full disclosure, I did select poetry markets with shorter response rates. The same is not true for the fiction and nonfiction markets I’ve selected (that is, I did not take response rate into account at all when choosing markets for those genres).
19. Received 7/3/2016 by Dana Mele
18. Received 7/3/2016 by Dana Mele
17. Received 7/3/2016 by Dana Mele
16. Received 7/3/2016 by Dana Mele
15. Received 7/3/2016 by Dana Mele
Four poems. I know I said earlier that I have a thing against cutting and pasting correspondence, but I think an exception can be made when there is absolutely no identifying information.
I just received this gem of a rejection, in its entirety with no greeting or signature:
“I’m sorry to have to say no.”
Well then.
15% and going strong!
14. Received 7/3/2016 by Dana Mele
13. Received 7/3/2016 by Dana Mele
12. Received 7/3/2016 by Dana Mele
11. Received 7/3/2016 by Dana Mele
A short story, a market I like a lot.
10. Received 7/2/2016 by Dana Mele
This one was for a poem that I wrote specifically for the submission. It was a new type of poem I’ve never tried before, and I suppose this means I’ll need to practice a bit more. This is day three and I’m at 10% of the goal. So far I’m going it solo, but you know what? 10 rejections in three days makes me confident that I can knock out 100. I have around 50 submissions in queues right now.
And it’s made me wonder whether I write and submit a lot more than other writers with similar circumstances (day jobs and/or primary parent status). I truly don’t know. I’m not a person who wakes up and writes for two hours every morning. I do my writing in between freelance jobs, during my toddler’s naps, and late at night. It would be very difficult to figure out how much time I spend doing it, because it’s in all the crammed in hours of the day when I’m not doing all the other things I do.
It doesn’t matter, I think. I don’t think there is a certain amount of writing a person needs to do per day, or an amount that tips over into too much. I certainly don’t believe there is a magical “writing time” of the day. I know people swear by early morning, but even if I had no morning conflicts, my brain is useless at that hour. The best writing I could probably do at the hour when writing gurus often insist writing should happen is shading my eyes from the sunlight with one hand and swatting keys at random with the other.
Ten percent in just three days! Woo!
I am a rejection machine.
9. Received 7/1/2016 by Dana Mele
Rejection nine was for a nonfiction publication. I have yet to garner an acceptance for nonfiction, not counting academic publications from back in the day. I’ve been trying to break into that genre for a while now, and no luck.
Rejections six through eight were for a poetry contest. Contests are always a little tougher, but the hopes are always a little higher too. Not many markets are still paying these days, and with good reason. The print world has taken a huge hit in the past ten years or so, from mega media outlets down to tiny literary magazines.
Pulitzer and Hearst, they think they got us, do they got us?
No!
And now no one does. It’s wonderful, sort of, from the viewpoint of the consumer. In an academic sense it opens a can of worms, which I won’t touch as an editor of an online only, non-paying, negative profit literary magazine.
But as a writer?
It would be nice to be paid.
8. Received 7/1/2016 by Dana Mele
7. Received 7/1/2016 by Dana Mele
6. Received 7/1/2016 by Dana Mele
5. Received 6/30/2016 by Dana Mele
Rejections two through five were poetry submissions. This challenge has given me the courage and the motivation to step beyond my comfort zone of short fiction. I have had a lot of difficulty breaking into nonfiction and poetry markets, so I embrace this challenge. Maybe by the end I’ll have a “rejection fail” or two (an acceptance!) though that’s not the goal here. I’m still really hoping not to go this solo, but if I do, I think I can still cross that finish line. 100 days is a long time and I have a lot of pieces sitting in queues or awaiting my revisions.
Revisions- a topic for another challenge. And now, a piece to read while waiting for rejections: Monica Byrne (whose short fiction we have previously featured and whose novel The Girl in the Road is an absolute must read) on her anti-resumé.
4. Received 6/30/2016 by Dana Mele
3. Received 6/30/2016 by Dana Mele
2. Received 6/30/2016 by Dana Mele
1. Received 6/29/2016 by Dana Mele
A science fiction dystopian story rejected from a magazine I admire. I logged the rejection on duotrope, selected another market that I also admire, and submitted it for consideration. This second choice is also a long shot, but I really like this piece, so I’m going for it. Wish me luck.
