Either I am writing or reading slush, at least that’s what I like to tell myself. In reality, I spend more time thinking about writing, more time thinking over the dozens of rejections I have received. Days, sometimes weeks are lost to a frozen paralysis where I wonder what the point is. It is difficult to write, and once you have written still more difficult to get published.

If I am lucky the rejections are like this:

We like your writing but…

If I am not, they are just rejections. Either way I am left to wonder what I am doing and why I do it.

In this mood I read slush. I read carefully, because I believe in the sanctity of the written word, the honor of carving out the time to sit down and write in the face of jobs, homework, dirty dishes, and a dozen other duties.

There are days when I rage because it’s clear the writer just flung words at the page—copious spelling errors, stories with ill-thought out plots, stories that are the wrong genre. Mostly, the stories are clean, well scrubbed in the way of children who are brought up with great care. In each of them there is something to love and something to fight for.

But the statistics simply aren’t in the writer’s favor.  Out of the 150 or so stories I’ve read for Shimmer, I’ve recommended twenty or so to the board. Of those twenty, three have made it in.

There are stories I loved never submitted to the board, simply because they weren’t right for the magazine, or passages that shone like gemstones were scattered across the page instead of linked together in careful chains, or the chains were there but the gemstones were dull, things I’d seen before, but the chains in and of themselves are finely wrought, worthy of respect. Mostly it is with great sorrow that I write rejections.

I aim for transparency. This is what worked. This is what didn’t. This is what I liked personally, but this isn’t what works for Shimmer.

I try not to think about how rejections are like little bombs in an inbox that explode, casting pall over the day. I imagine the writers are stronger than I am, better able to weather rejections and keep going.

Then the rejection is sent and it’s over.

Sometimes though, the stories linger in my mind, stay for days, sometimes weeks like the faint lavender aroma that sticks to your clothing.

I tell these stories to my friends, quoting my favorite passages—guys, you’ve got to listen to this—but mostly I roll them around in my mind, savoring the twists and turns, the new doors they have flung open in my mind, the secret shameless conversations of garden plants, imaginary cities hidden between doorways and alleys where sages dispense ridiculous wisdom, the infinite possibilities written in the night sky.

And when I go out into the world, I look at the trees and the sticks and stones and think of your stories, the hidden dimensions they brought to the most ordinary of objects, the most ordinary of people. The world is stranger, newer, full of mysteries I never saw before and I am so glad that I got a chance to read your stories even if Shimmer could not publish them.

Keep writing. We’re reading.

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Writing image by Habbi-Stock on dA.