Small Victories

I know that I'm a no-name writer. I haven't sold anything, so my stories go straight into the slush pile. My best bet for a first sale is to an anthology or contest where every entry starts in the same slush pile. When you send a submission to a well established magazine, submissions are separated into the "we know this person" pile and the "we don't know this person" pile. I'm sure some anthologies have teh same process. Guess which pile gets read first? I'm usually not in that pile.
So I have had two rejections in the last week that have been very encouraging. One came from one of the big name magazines in the field, the other came from one of the more popular on line magazines. Both are well known for quick turn arounds on rejections. My submissions took a bit longer to get back to me, because they passed the first reader. The actual editor of the magazine read my story. He rejected it, but the fact that it got that far is good news for me. The other uses a round robin approach to handling submissions, and was rejected in the second round.
No apparent sales in 2005 (only three days to go, and only three days to finish my WotF entry) but things are looking up for 2006.

Christmastime is here...

And that means I have about ten days to finish editing my WOTF entry for this quarter. I have also gone through a year in review of my work, since I'm pulling out a story that I wrote back in February and dusting it off. Since starting the "serious" side of my publishing life, I have written 43 stories, six of which I am actively trying to sell, and seven of which are in my "half breed" lists, stories which I need to finish. I put 17 stories on the table at Wordos, and have considered jumping back into the online critique world. I have an account on Lit.org, but I haven't touched it in a while. I am a few stories short of Jay Lake's "Story a Week" goal, but I have also written 40,000 words of one novel, and 10,000 of another thanks to NaNoWriMo. While I love writing novel length pieces, November is, for me, a crappy month to write one. Now that I'm working part time, I have even less time to write, but hopefully our family schedule will solidify in January and I'll have a daily scheduled time to write.
I have learned that there are too many rules of writing that people take too seriously. I have learned that I have a unique voice (just like anyone else, I'm not being egotistical here) that I have to use. I have learned how to give good critiques, and I need a few stories to practive on. I have learned that my brother, as encouraging as he was all my life, can give really good feedback now that I'm a "serious" writer. I have learned that piles of books on building plot, creating characters, and techniques of functional fiction lead my wife to ask me if writing is any fun. If there was a point in the year I would have stopped writing, that question would have been it. Writing is an art form, not a chore, so when I think of writing as a quotidian duty, it becomes less fun and I work on other projects, like programming my submission database manager or trying to get my l25 Bowazon through the 2nd world Boss Monster in Diablo 2.
I have also learned that Jay Lake was right when he said "the best reason to keep a bunch of stories in the mail is to a)sell them, and b)make individual rejections hurt less than they already do.