Short Stuff

Professors submit research to journals and are often rejected. We almost always receive detailed feedback. When rejected we may revise and submit to another venue, but sometimes the feedback is off-base, so we submit without revising.

An author of around 100 published pieces of short fiction spoke at the workshop I attended. She said that on average each of her published pieces was rejected 5.5 times. One piece was rejected 32 times before being published in a professional publication.

Some of the workshop attendees are afraid to submit. I have read about that problem, but I do not suffer from it. Since I only began writing short stories last year, I have not submitted even one of them five times.

Looks like I have work to do.