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.