A Word on Persistence

✶ we interrupt your regularly-scheduled newsletter for this mini pep talk ✶

Writing of any form, whether microfiction, poetry, stories, or novels, is a solitary endeavor. If we’re lucky, we have a supportive spouse or family member that reads our stuff and says, “cool story.” If we’re really lucky, perhaps we’re part of a writing community that can provide informed feedback on our precious prose, and we’re even luckier if we’re in a headspace to be able to take that feedback and apply it…

But typically, all the hard work is done alone. The midnight wrestlings with that ONE sentence that you KNOW isn’t right, but you can’t come up with anything better. That attack of imposter syndrome right before you hit the ‘submit’ button to your dream magazine.

If you subscribe to this substack, you probably enjoy the Submission Game. Erm, well, maybe “enjoy” is a strong word… you put up with the shenanigans necessary to hopefully see your words in print (…better?). And unless you’re the reincarnation of Virginia Woolf, you’re probably used to way more rejections than acceptances.

But I’m here to tell you: keep trying.

A few weeks ago, I finally placed in the Globe Soup monthly micro contest with Signal Lost — exactly one year after I started entering them. (I know this because I keep a five-year-diary, and the entry above said, “my drabble entry in Globe Soup’s monthly contest was a top-tier finalist! Feels good, especially since it’s my first time entering…”) That’s an entire year of noodling over the prompt each month, trying to come up with something out of the box, shaping the words to the best of my ability. I was a Top-Tier Finalist three times, a Finalist twice, and had six entries that were apparently nothing special (though at least two of them I was SURE were absolute winners…)

I could have become discouraged. I could have thought, “what do those Globe Soup people know, this drabble is BRILLIANT.” But I just waited for the next prompt to drop, and kept on writing.

Keep racking up those R’s. Call them ‘hamsters,’ if it makes it sting a little less (“I wasn’t rejected, I was gifted an adorable little rodent!”) And keep showing up. I have a story I absolutely love that has been rejected over 25 times, but I keep yeeting it out — I know that it is somebody’s jam, I just haven’t found that person yet.

Let me leave you with this photo of the gorgeous little Blink-Ink magazine that has my dribble, Fireworks, on the last page:

This one was a tiny goal, to get in this beautiful magazine, and to be able to say that ✅ my writing is archived in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University.

There is no expiration date on your goals.

As long as you’re in the right head space*, keep submitting. Because you just never know…

Listen, I may never crack my dream magazines. I probably won’t be asked to contribute to a horror anthology and be TOC Buddies with Stephen King. But I have hit goals this year that I couldn’t have imagined even two years ago.

And I will never say never…

* (please take care of your mental health, first — it takes a fairly thick skin to handle continuous rejection, which it what submitting often comes down to. Just realize that nothing is more subjective than art, and a rejection is not a reflection on you, personally…)

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What you can look forward to from Micro Markets: themed and unthemed calls, monthly micro contests, micro-lit mags that are always open, micro-focused anthologies... maybe even some craft essays about writing microfiction and a place to feature YOUR published micros.

So dust off some of your tiny treasures, and let’s send them out into the world!