I’ve been writing and submitting stories for something like fifteen years. As this video attests, fifteen years of rejection slips is a lot (and those are just the paper ones. Add electronics subs and you’re looking at closer to 100).

Rejection is just a part of the game. And don’t be mistaken: it is a game. And the sooner you start to think of it as a game, the more sane you’ll be.

At one point, it was my goal to keep as many stories in circulation as possible. The most I ever had running at one time was 14. I just had a list of markets where I sent stories, by genre. Top mags were at the top. Lower-paying mags were at the bottom. When one came back, I’d simply file the rejection slip in my rejection folder and send the story back out to the next magazine on the list. It was a factory kind of thing, and it worked well for me. The more stories I had out, the more stories I sold.

Thing was, that was a difficult pace to keep up, and as I sold the best stories and retired the worst, my output fell off as I turned to focus on writing novels instead of shorts.

I don’t know that there’s any trick for staying totally sane while you’re pushing out stories. I remember coming home one dark night in Chicago and finding a form rejection slip from Ellen Datlow and just falling onto the floor in the kitchen and bursting into tears (it’d been a bad day). You can’t help but take things personally. You can’t help but think that you’ll never make it. Your stack gets bigger and bigger and there are days when screaming “Fuck you! You will be so sorry when I’m famous!” doesn’t do the trick anymore.

Just remember that it’s OK to burst into tears. It’s OK to scream FUCK YOU at every rejection letter, and it’s OK to throw things around your room and moan about how you’re wasting your time.

It’s OK because when you’re done screaming and moaning, you will stand back up, dust yourself off, and submit that story all over again. To the next magazine. And the next. And the next. Because that’s what you do. Because that’s what everybody does. Because if you were born famous and everything was easy then everybody would write for a living and your Aunt Edna would have a dozen short stories published in Weird Tales and your cousin Judy would be a New York Times Bestseller.

Instead, you persist. You persist because the people who make it are the ones who persist. You persist because the only way you can actually fail in this business is if you give up. Give in. It’s what everybody wants you to do. It’s easier on everybody. Especially you.

So just let yourself sob on the kitchen floor on occasion. Then get back up. Dust yourself off. And send it out again.

There’s an old proverb, “Fall down seven times. Get up eight.”

Now, I won’t be trite: the getting up is really fucking difficult. But failure, real failure, the I-give-up-it’s-too-hard failure, is a far bigger tragedy than getting up again.

So, decide who you’ll be. The person who slinks away after getting knocked out the first five or ten or twenty or hundred times, or the person who gets back up again. And again. And again. Until the book you’re holding in your hands at the local B&N is yours.

I can tell you, after fifteen years of knockouts and another fifteen to come, that it really is possible.

Sure, it hurts like hell, but it doesn’t hurt nearly as much as giving up.