Publication News

I have to thank my friend Tawnysha Greene for her wonderfully honest and inspiring post yesterday over on her blog.  A lot of writers are open about their rejections, but Tawnysha took this kind of honesty to a new level by revealing exactly how many times each of her published works had been rejected.  The numbers were truly astounding.  While some pieces were accepted after just a few rejections or even accepted by the first place she submitted them, a couple of pieces were rejected well over a hundred times before finding a home!  I know how good a writer Tawnysha is, so there were two different ways I could have responded to such statistics--I could have been depressed that the publishing world is so competitive (and subjective) that talented writers like Tawnysha are overlooked, or I could have been inspired by her tenacity and determination.  I chose the latter.

After I read Tawnysha's post, I decided to dust off some old pieces that had been rejected and resubmit them.  I realized that by only submitting a story four or five times, I wasn't really giving it a fair shake.  I started with a story I discussed in another post last summer, a piece that I really love but that had been rejected four times.  Last semester I made a lot of excuses for not resubmitting the story--usually blaming comps, my (very weak) excuse for everything last semester--but yesterday I decided to stop making excuses and just do the damn thing.  So I submitted the story to seven places.  I've never sent a story to so many places at once before, but Tawnysha's post made me realize I needed to cast my net wider and deeper.  And this time I caught something.

This morning I received an email from The Citron Review--less than 24 hours after I submitted my story to them--asking to publish "Black & White" in their Spring 2011 issue in March.  Of course I then had to withdraw the story from six other places, but it was well worth it to see this story finally published.

So I have to give a special thanks to Tawnysha for writing such an honest and inspiring post.  It's thanks to her that today I have one more publishing cred to my name.