Am I Losing? Or Is this What Winning Looks Like?

Welcome to my annual blog post about acceptance and rejection in which I tally up my writing submissions from the previous year and tell you how many magazines and presses in 2022 said, We love your work, Shuly! and how many places gave me the big boot. 

If you’re new to my blog or have never been around in January, I should tell you upfront that my annual goal is always to aim for one hundred rejections. “Wait, what?” you newbies are asking. “You aim for rejections?”

Why of course. Life is filled with wins and losses, acceptances and rejections, and every writer knows that in the writing world, rejections are the most common currency. (Well, every un-famous writer knows this—I cannot speak for the famous writers since I am unknown except to my family and friends and people who friended me merely because FaceBook suggested it). 

I aim for one hundred rejections because I might as well make a game out of it, and because if I can get that many rejections, odds are that I will also get some acceptances. My typical rate of acceptance is 10% (which, if you’re not into math, means that if I get 100 rejections, I’m likely to get 10 acceptances).

Let’s start with a review of the last couple of years:   

In 2020, I received 88 rejections and 2 acceptances. I didn’t submit enough to reach 100 rejections, but with that track record, surely I would have. My acceptance rate was about 2% that year. Eek.

In 2021, I received 174 rejections (wow, that’s a lot), but I also received 30 acceptances. Woooo hoooo!!! That’s a 17% acceptance rate. 

And in 2022 . . . (here's the requisite drum roll) . . .

I received 43 rejections and and and . . . 3 acceptances! 

You’re probably asking, “Is that exclamation point because she thinks 3 acceptances is good or bad?” Actually, I never think of the numbers as good or bad, black or white, but I like to dig into them.

First of all, clearly I didn't submit enough to reach 100 rejections. I'm okay with that. 

Yet here’s the odd thing: nearly all of the 43 rejections came from literary magazines saying no to my individual pieces, BUT of the three acceptances, only one was from a literary magazine saying yes to an individual piece (thank you, Invisible City, for encouraging me to submit again after rejecting my work the first time). The other two acceptances were for…books of mine! Whole books! Books that had many of the pieces that were rejected by other places!

Those exclamation points mean: I am happy. One of those books (What the Fortune Teller Might Have Said) even won a prize.

My acceptance rate for 2022 was 7%, so I think I need to stop saying my acceptance rate is 10%. It apparently isn’t and hasn’t been for years, if it ever was.

The most important takeaway? Never give up on yourself or what you want or what you love. And if you’re a writer, write first for yourself. If you aren’t happy writing, then what’s the point? I loved writing every single piece I sent out into the world, whether it was rejected or not. And that, in my book (pun intended), is the biggest win.

Photo credit: Taylor Skaff. 

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A Tale of Grief, Hope, and Four Orchids

For most of my life, I hardly noticed orchids. Years ago, my husband was given one that must have been blooming when he got it, but if it was, I did not pay attention and have no memory of its color. That flowerless orchid has sat by our kitchen window for all this time, somehow not dying. My husband watered the bloomless plant with its slender leaves whenever he remembered, which was every few weeks at best. The truth is I didn’t keep track. I didn’t care. I had a whole house of other plants to water and prune and re-pot as needed. And I had our dog, Kibbi, who needed a regimen of medicine and had for many years.

Then this summer, one of Kibbi’s eyes got an ulcer, and my days became a schedule of eye drops three times a day, along with her familiar regimen of pills. She started wearing a cone. Around this time, I determined that my husband’s orchid needed re-potting. I became fixated on the idea of giving this orchid a new lease on life, and I tried to find a nursery who could do the deed. We finally handed the orchid over to someone with know-how and gentle hands, and she gave my husband’s orchid a better home, a green ceramic pot with slits down the side—no more plastic cup with holes—and she taught me how to mix a gallon jug with fertilizer, how to pour the concoction without reservation over the leaves and into the bark mix, how to let the plant drain til there was no liquid left.

“It’s healthy,” she said. She pointed to a teeny leaf just emerging. “See this? That’s a good sign.” This was nearing the end of July, and Kibbi’s eye was not healing, and she had been wearing a plastic cone for nearly a month by then, and we’d been putting drops in her eye like clockwork. My husband’s orchid became my obsession. I focused on that tiny leaf, and I watered the orchid with fertilizer every week as directed, and I watched that tiny leaf grow, becoming stronger and longer and more sturdy.

Meanwhile Kibbi was taking two steps forward, one step back. Our vet said to keep doing what we were doing. It would just take time.

At the start of September, we went to North Carolina to see my sister, and she helped care for Kibbi, who was still wearing a cone, still needing a laundry list of medications and eye drops. One early morning, my sister told us something we did not want to hear: Kibbi had been walking into walls. We knew what this meant: Kibbi’s one good eye had now gone bad. We made plans to see our vet as soon as we returned. Later that morning, still in North Carolina, while Kibbi—with her cone and failing eyes—stayed in the car, we ran into an upscale grocery store to grab coffee, yogurt, maybe some bananas. That’s when I saw the orchid display, so lovely. I wanted one. Then I looked at how they were potted, and I knew enough by then to grasp that the orchids’ situations were dire—there was no way for the orchids to drain when watered. All these orchids were doomed. Doomed! So I bought one, only because I wanted to save it. I wanted them all, but I couldn’t buy an entire display of orchids.

We took Kibbi to the vet as soon as we returned home. It wasn’t good news: her good eye had an ulcer too. She needed to see a specialist. I took the new orchid to the nursery and had it repotted into a proper pot with drain holes. I set the new orchid by our old orchid. The new orchid dropped its blooms within days. I continued on: I cared for Kibbi; I cared for the orchids. I looked for signs everywhere that things were getting better.

But they weren’t, not for our beloved dog. She had procedures meant to help but that involved too much pain, and there was no way forward without a great deal more suffering. We made the difficult choice: we said goodbye to our great love.

In the weeks that followed I spent a lot of time inspecting the old and new orchids, searching for signs of new leaves, moving the plants around to offer them the best light. Then in mid-October my parents handed over a flowerless orchid that had been gifted to them, and it had been so poorly potted by whatever store it had come from that nearly all the plant’s roots had rotted. I took it to the nursery. They said, “You can’t repot this now. You need to see if it can recover.” They took it out of its miserable medium and gave the orchid new bark mixture and told me to give it at least six months. In other words: orchid hospice.

Last week, I eyed the orchids at the grocery store. Showy, full of color, vibrant. Then I peeked into the pots and saw that all I’d be signing up for was more orchid hospice. But they needed me, didn’t they? I put an orchid in my grocery cart. I rolled a few feet away. I turned around, put the orchid back. I couldn’t risk that something else might die.

I know: it’s an orchid. But it was never about the orchid, you and I both know that.

A day later I couldn’t help myself: suddenly I was driving to the nursery, perusing the orchid display. These orchids were more expensive than the grocery store ones, but they were potted perfectly. “Grown responsibly from start to finish” the tag read. My spirits rose. And then there she was: a small orchid with big leaves and two stems crowded with lavender blooms.

A fourth orchid? Really, Shuly? But this one is blooming, I told myself. It’s so beautiful.

She sits on my desk now, right beside me as I work. Sometimes when I go into another room for a few hours, I take her with me. I never want her out of sight: she’s all flamboyance, and I am all fawning. I know that she, too, will eventually lose her flowers. But in this moment, she has it all—and she is alive. In this moment, so am I.

Photo credit: Yours truly. Photo is of the new beauty.

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COMING SOON:
What the Fortune Teller Would Have Said:
a Flash Essay Chapbook

Winner of the 2022 Iron Horse Literary Review
Prose Chapbook Contest

What You Don't Yet Know You Need

We checked the weekend forecast before we left for Blowing Rock: sunny and highs in 60s, the perfect kind of mountain autumn weather. We pictured coffee and eggs for early breakfasts, walks in the woods and around Bass Lake, the late afternoon sun slanting across our faces as we sat on a porch. We packed up the car and drove across the state line and into North Carolina. The day was heading into evening, and my parents were with us, and the four of us were chatting as we drove along a winding country road.

Then it burst into our conversation—the sound of clanking metal. Suddenly we were pulling off the road and onto the end of a gravel driveway with a NO TRESPASSING sign, a locked gate, no houses in sight. The tire was blown—how bad, we didn’t know. My husband, Preston, tried to use a repair kit to fix it, but the repair kit wasn’t kicking on, and when it finally did after an hour, it failed to fix a thing. By that time, we had called AAA for a tow, but where to go? Back home, or on to our destination? We were forty miles from home already, so we opted to keep on.

But there was one hitch: “There’s room for only one person in the tow truck,” the AAA employee said. It was nearing dark, and there were three of us who would be left on a rural country road soon, so I called the first person Preston and I could think to call: David.

To tell you about David, I need to take you back two years ago to a summer day when Kibbi, our dog, was of course still alive. Preston and I were walking her on the streets of Blowing Rock when we came upon a guy with flip-flops sitting out on a stoop listening to beach music and throwing a ball for his elderly border collie, Jim. The dogs sniffed each other, and we began a conversation that evening we kept having every time we saw David throwing a ball for Jim out on that stoop on other nights, on other weekends.

Sometimes dogs give you what you don’t yet know you need.

That summer and then that fall, we kept running into David and Jim until finally we humans exchanged numbers, and instead of waiting to run into each other, we got together—for walks, for lunches, for dinners out or in. One time we took David to the next town over when he’d had surgery and needed meds. One time I worked with him on a document for his work. One time he agreed to march around town with me when Preston had opted for a run. Many times, the three of us have talked over issues each of us were facing in our lives: medical, cultural, professional, personal. We have exchanged personal histories, theories about the human race, and our various political persuasions.

Jim died less than a year after we all met, and David used to say our friendship was Jim’s last gift, but now that Kibbi has died, I’d say it was one of her gifts, too. When the AAA employee said only one person could fit in the tow truck, when we were thinking about who to call in Blowing Rock who would be willing to make the drive to come out and get us, the truth is we didn’t hesitate to call David, and he didn’t hesitate to say yes. He offered to pick Preston up at the tire place, too, even though it was getting later in the night. That’s the kind of friendship we all have.

I thought about that as David drove me and my parents to our destination. He had shoved his belongings aside to make room for ours in the bed of his truck. He had adjusted the temperature to whatever we wanted. He made us laugh and told stories, and we forgot for a few minutes our car had a blown tire, that it was getting late, and I forgot about the pain of losing my beloved dog, and I thought then only of this friendship she left, this lasting gift.

(Photo credit: chmyphotography from unsplash.com)

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