The One Thousand etc. etc.

So The One Thousand, One Hundred and Eleven Keys to the Gates of Faerie was rejected by Reflection's Edge magazine, after being submitted a few weeks back. I can't fault the response times, nor the detail of their communications.

I did what I always do when faced with rejection and succumbed to despair. It's the only way. Although I find it doesn't last so long these days, so either I've just become more used to it, or I've become more sure of my worth as a writer over the years. And of course, yeah yeah, the lows make the highs of acceptance all the higher.

The other thing I generally do when this happens is to re-read the relevant piece - inevitably editing and polishing once again - to see whether it really is just rubbish after all. It's so easy to convince yourself that it is. But it isn't; it's a good story.

Rejections happen for all sorts of reasons. I've become more and more convinced that things happen often for no particularly good reason. They just happen. And I don't just mean stories being accepted or rejected. I mean pretty well anything. We humans like to see meaning and pattern in the universe but that's often just the way our brains work, not the way the universe does. So, yes, the quality of a story is obviously important when a magazine assesses a story. But so are a host of other things : the mood of the person doing the assessing their personal preferences, the profile of other stories already accepted and so on.

Yep, amateur philosophizing is also a key part of the healing process! Meanwhile, the story has gone off into the aether again, knocking on other doors in search of a home ...