Writing Blog

20220307 Story

March 7, 2022, 9:00pm

I received a rejection today. The rejection itself was not that bad - I mean, they are par for the course as a writer who tries to sell their work to trad publishers - but this was the fifth time I've tried to sell this story and each time it's been rejected. And, worse, I think it is one of the better medium-length short stories I have written.

I wrote it as an experiment to see if I could write in a series of voices, and it was first submitted to an anthology called Journey Through The Genres, which wanted writers to mash-up 3 or more genres. This got its first rejection, and it was also the most positive rejection.

While the story is well-written and we enjoyed it you have not done a mashup as we requested it's a genre jump from one to another.

(This is a copy-paste; maybe I was lucky not getting selected by a company that managed so many mistakes in one sentence.)

So I struggled to find markets. I did find another anthology but it received a generic form rejection, So I tried magazines. Because of its word count (6700), only a few magazines would suit, and the last of them rejected it today because

...it is not fantasy enough.

So... here's my dilemma. I was debating whether to post it here, but I have noticed that longer works (while it is not huge, it seems to be in the upper echelon of word count) don't get a lot of views; my current view-count for my longer works here is low, and let's not even talk about the lack of feedback. So is it worth my time to put such a long piece here? Would I get any meaningful feedback? Would I need to explain the genres I used/authors whose styles I copied?

Help with this would be appreciated. And that means if you think I shouldn't bother, let me know.