I wish there was a correlation between checking email, checking the mailbox, and faster response times. Like if somehow the whoosh of opening the mailbox could somehow bring the answer forward a little more each day. Lord knows how many times I check my multiple email accounts per day, but it’s many.

However, I’m also in the curious position of not wanting to find a particular response in my mailbox, and that’s from F&SF. I’m at 25 days, which is twice the average response time, and leads me to believe my story wasn’t rejected out of hand — but a response in the next week or two would almost certainly be a rejection. No response means at worst it’s still being deliberated. (Well, I guess the worst case is that it slipped between the couch cushions and no one’s looking at it.) For that one, I’m more than content to wait. Although there’s no point in getting my hopes up — just ’cause they’re hanging onto it doesn’t mean they’re going to buy it, and the Black Hole says F&SF has rejected stories after as many as fourth months.

It’s nuts to think how much I’ve learned about the writing biz in the last eighteen months, mostly due to the Clarion experience. Before Clarion, the whole publishing thing seemed like a complete mystery. For awhile after Clarion, it seemed incredibly complex with dozens of variables to gauge how you were doing. More than a year on, things seem incredibly simple, at least for me — you write the best story you can, you send it to a place you believe would have reasonable interest, and that place accepts it or rejects it. Simple.

Response times and personalized rejections might let me know whether I was close or not but, unless I specifically get a request to do a rewrite (which I never have,) they don’t mean much else. A long response time can just as well mean the slush reader is procrastinating rather than meaning they’re sleeping with my story under their pillow. A form rejection letter can mean that the slusher has to run to the grocery, pick the dog up from the groomers, and finish proofing the next issue all before 4:45 and therefore didn’t have time to write any nice notes the stories she’s rejecting today. On the flip side, a personalized, gushing rejection is still a rejection — and I’m not writing hoping for positive rejections, although it’s always nice to get an editor’s opinion of where the story might be going wrong.

Quite simply, progress can be measured by one criteria: sales to discerning/reputable pubs. That’s it.

My timeline for making such sales is from now until the end of my life so there’s no hurry. I’m just a little more antsy than usual because I’d like to get a thing or two sold before the end of the year to bolster the ol’ CV when it comes time to apply for grad programs. That, and it would be nice to have a string of things appearing in a variety of places in a small amount of time to help inflate the street cred.

And it’s all about the street cred, isn’t it? Sure as hell isn’t about the money!

(PS - I’m fully aware that the next step in my writing career is to not blog all of my amateurish musings on how things work. With any luck, it will come soon.)