100 rejections: April update

Hello fellow rejectioneers (AKA fellow writers). April has been and gone so I thought I’d share my April rejection updates. I don’t have a whole lot to write here in terms of content. I did this blog post for Ballarat Writers if you want some of the broad strokes (which I’ve covered here in other updates as well). I did want to share that I’ve had another failed rejection (AKA publication) in April: with Misery Tourism. I’ll link it here when it’s posted, but it’s all very exciting stuff. I was also published with Defenestration Mag this month (I’ve linked to the story on the blog but here it is again if you like).

Rejection stats as of April 30

If you’re just scrolling down and looking for numbers, here they are:

16 submissions total, made up of:

8 rejections

5 pending

2 accepter (+1 pending revisions))

General business

Otherwise the month has been pretty quiet. I’ve been really busy with work, so I’ve been doing less writing, but I was inspired by the increased web traffic, so I set up a Twitter and made the website look a little snazzier. I will say that what this month did was make me re-centre myself a little as a writer. I dug out some old work and had a serious look at it. I now have some skeletons to work on (now WordPress isn’t my only necromancy talent), which will make submitting a little easier. Having two pieces out of circulation means I need to write more, and it’s easier to polish up something that was most of the way there than not. I also finally redrafted a blog post that had been provisionally accepted (with a few notes for a redraft) so hopefully there will be something here soon.

Let’s have a whinge

I’m a big fan of a whinge, and for once it’s justified. I submitted something that was accepted in September 2020 (this doesn’t appear in my stats, for the folks playing at home). As of 2 May 2021, it still hasn’t been published. I contacted the website in early March to ask what was going on (because they were spruiking for new content) and they assured me that it would be published. Still waiting. I’ve actually just started trying to shop that piece around again. Current wait time: Seven months I also submitted something in late October this year (which DOES appear in my stats) – I’m also still waiting to hear back from that one. They’re posting on twitter still, and sometimes it’s an acknowledgement that they’re going through submissions, so I’ll just keep waiting for my rejection on that one. Current wait time: Six months   Seven months is the longest I’ve ever waited to hear back from a submission (and in that case it was rejected T_T). I know that I said that the idea was to assume rejection and move on, but one of these was written only for that publication, and I’d like it on my publication list (if I even get accepted). The older piece that I’m waiting on is a weird poem; I’ve been looking for somewhere else to submit it but it’s a bit tricky because it’s a kind of humour/erotica poem. I did submit it somewhere a few days ago, but my hopes aren’t high.

Moving forward

My interim goal is 50 submissions by the end of June. If you have a calendar, you can see that this means that I need to write a lot more and submit a lot more as well. I’m going to try, danggit! Also, as a stretch goal, I’m going to see if I can get paid for a submission by the end of the year as well (how cool would that be?). Dare to dream! I’ll see you during the month, hopefully, and I’ll keep posting published work as it happens. Thank you for reading!