Hundreds of #Literary #Rejections Later, Yet All Is Not Lost #Pretend I'm Your Friend

How far we've come from the days when the stories in my ill-fated (until now) collection were roundly rejected by everyone in publishing town!  Remember?  Do your mammalian minds reach back as far as 2007? I sent those stories out individually, and as a collection, and then as two collections, and still nobody wanted them.

"Publish a novel," they said. "Then someone might care about your collection."

"But these stories are special," I said. "They're linked!"

"Who cares about rejection?"

It didn't matter, though, because those were the days of rejections, so many of them, adding up to years. Now I can look back at them fondly because they are in the past. At the time, though, as you know, I wailed and lgnashed my teeth and pulled my hair.

Finally I published the novel in 2014. And, guess what, mice: they were right! As you can see above I now have advanced reading copies of the linked story collection, which my publisher calls "entwined."

The advanced reading copies arrived on Saturday to my front porch. I took the above picture as proof that there can be a pay-off to hanging in there and being persistent.  Like a cockroach, a literary cockroach.

There are worse things. Never say die, right?