100 rejections: February Update

We’re at the end of February (and well into March) so I thought I’d reflect on my process so far.

I started this project to encourage myself to write more. Unfortunately that hasn’t happened so much yet. But I will say that submitting material that I don’t feel as strongly about feels kind of embarrassing, which wasn’t an emotion I was expecting. But I have tried to soldier on with my first prospects—when I thought about this as a process, I had a few publications in mind. I think that I’ve now submitted to most of them. The thing about submitting is that you get an idea of how quickly these pubs get back to you—some don’t respond at all. Some take a few weeks. One has been nearly five months so far, and only got back to me in January about reading submissions.

I started counting rejections in October or so of last year, just to build a bit of a buffer and get into the spirit of the project. I started 2020 with 3 rejections under my belt, and some submissions waiting to come back.

At the end of January, my stats are:

10 submissions

3 rejections

6 pending

1 acceptances (this one requires me redrafting, which I will do eventually)

And, just because I want to write it down somewhere, I had an acceptance last year that never panned out.

This means I’m not quite on track for the year for rejections, but I am for submissions, but some of that is from the bank of material that I had before the year started.

For February, it’d be nice to have two new things to start shopping around the place, and to look for some new opportunities. I should also try and writing something non-fictiony and see if I can find a home for that as well. It’s just a matter of finding the time.

Note: Obviously I wrote this post in January. I didn’t write another post for February because I basically didn’t submit anything =\ I got caught up with last minute university work and all of that, and so I wasn’t really keeping a close eye on things. I will do another update at the end of March so that you can all see how gloriously I’m failing (flailing? either way).