My Year of Writing Rejections in Review

Over the holiday, my husband said to me, “I’m so proud of everything you did this year.” Yes, seriously.

He is a glass-half-full sort of person, which generally makes him, happily, the social-facing partner in our relationship in the same way an extrovert may end up in the customer-facing role at Starbucks. In this metaphor, I am a glass-mostly-empty barista hiding in the back.

So when my husband said, “…everything you did this year,” I responded, “You mean getting rejected from a gazillion lit mags?”

He said no, that’s obviously not what he meant, and also, why was I exaggerating?

Like I said to my husband, I tracked all of my creative writing submissions for the year, so I have the receipts.

Let’s look at the data, yeah? For science, and for the chance to prove who is right: my husband or me. Please hold all guesses till the end!

• Rejections: 43

• Acceptances: 5

• Longlists: 2

• Shortlists: 0

You may be thinking, not unlike my husband, that 43 is significantly less than a gazillion.

To which I would say: hyperbole is a literary device to create strong emphasis through exaggeration. And this is a creative writing discussion, after all. I try to use hyperbole as an excuse for being wrong any chance I can get. I will let you know when it works.

This is a long way of saying, my husband is kind, too kind, and unfailingly optimistic.

He would make a terrible moody creative.

If pressed, I could rewrite that data in a different way. 5 acceptances versus 43 rejections sounds terrible, right?

What if I wrote: I had an ~11% acceptance rate. Does that sound a little better?

Or, how about this: Every one of those rejections and every one of those acceptances was a brick in the same road. A road I wanted to walk down, hoping to find a wizard at the end but realizing the journey was the whole point.

(Anyone else see Wicked over the holiday?)

If I were a glass-half-full person, maybe I’d feel happy about the acceptances without needing the receipts. But I’m not, and the data really helps.

The data helps me to zoom out, appreciate the big picture, hold everything in my mind a little more equally.

I think I’ll shoot for 50 rejections in 2026, bricklaying wherever I can. Each rejection helps extend that creative writing road a little bit further. As my rejections scale up, maybe I’ll find some more acceptance bricks (non-technical term) along the way.

I want to say this one was a draw between my husband and me.

Do you think he’d buy that?