Writing is a brutal business.  Even the best authors get strings of rejections, and often the rejections have nothing to do with the quality of the work.  They also happen because of the quality of the work, so it is blessedly hard to tell if you are banging your head against a wall for nothing or you just need to wait for the right story, at the right publication, at the right time.

I have a friend who used to track every ejection and how many rejections she got before each accept.  At one point she had over 200 rejections without an acceptance letter.  Even when things were going great she was averaging 19 rejections to an accept (and many of those accepts were at pro-paying and prestigious magazines).

So it gave me a thrill to get the email for Page and Spine accepting my story “The Cats of Santa Agatha.”  I’m told publication date is set in stone for  October 19th.

In related news, I now have filing and other “office” type work to get done.