FlashFiction.Net

If you write it, (eventually) they will come (the acceptances, that is), and then what will you do? You might dream of more important, more prestigious places, and even those might very well come. For the flash writer, there's the possibility of going really big with a "novel-in-flashes," but more likely it will be a collection/chapbook from a smaller press and that too might be in your future. What will you do with all these acceptances? How will you ever recover?

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If you aren't sure how to answer these pressing questions of acceptance, then you've come to the right place. Here are six (6) ways I've found to put acceptances in perspective  and get back into the exciting world of being the outsider nobody wants to let into their elitist cliques, a feeling that dates all the way back to lunch rooms and study groups and bus seats.

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1. It's process that gave you the high. The act is the same, whether the note in the self-addressed stamped envelope that days, week, months, sometimes a year later makes its way back home tells you yes or no. You read the return address, open the letter, read it, exclaim some preferred interjection, and get on with the day. The real high came when you transcended this world by transforming yourself into writing—when you became the act itself, the word after word in search of something always outside your grasp. That's way better than the act of opening an envelope, yes?



2. It's never enough. Yes, that acceptance is a sign that everyone—your third grade teacher, your mum, your dad, your writing professor, your sophomore year writing workshop—didn't have a clue about your potential. You showed them. You proved them wrong. But one more acceptance would really show them, wouldn't it? That's what makes acceptance depressing to me, their inability to fill all the things I want them to. So, I just face the fact that the love that I didn't get is lost, that I'll never get it, that it becomes part of a long list of all the unrecoverable things in this world. I'm as unloved before the acceptance as after. Knowing that makes me feel much better.



3. Sim-sub to the same tier. Let's say you send your flash piece out to six journals. Make sure that you would be equally thrilled to have it accepted in any of those six. Do you really want to have to say no to the Atlantic Monthly because Joe's Flash Zine just published it? No, you don't. So send that piece out to Atlantic, Harper's, Ploughshares, Paris Review, Boulevard, Granta—and that way you don't have to worry about what might've been.



4. You can't have it both ways. You can't tell yourself that it doesn't matter that a journal's reader(s) rejected your story (because you grasp the combination of luck & subjectivity at work in the slush pile)—and then tell yourself that it does matter, however, when that same dynamic works in your favor for an acceptance. Well, you can tell yourself such a thing, but it's a bit kooky.Of course, it's better when they say "yes" than when they say "no," but in both cases, there's the chance  they got it wrong. Yes? So I always give a little "shout out" to the submission gods & goddesses, and that recognition of "a higher power" keeps me humble enough not to have rejections and acceptances continually create that rollercoastery combination of lows & highs in my (way too sensitive) belly.



5. The Withdrawal Method doesn't work. Yes, they told us such a thing in sex education classes, and the same thing holds true in the submission process. Too often, I've withdrawn a story only to have it come back as something that had continued to be considered for publication. I'm not sure what to make of the fact that withdraw requests often go unread or unheeded, but it might not be a great plan to flood the market with a flash piece with the idea that you can send withdraw requests once it's been accepted somewhere. Odds are that at least some of those requests won't get into the right hands and that your story will continue its journey through the slush, out of the slush, into final consideration. You'll be bummed when it gets accepted twice, thrice and submissions will become something bad instead of something fairly good. Ergo, I usually send a piece that is being sim-subbed to no more than five (5) places at once.



6. Self Shout-Outs Drive Me Nuts, Eventually. I do grasp the petty jealousy and immaturity involved in my getting sick of hearing, once again, where someone else has been published. I apologize. I can't help it. If I were well-balanced, I wouldn't be a writer, right? And there might be others like me. So sometimes, now and then, maybe we should keep it to ourselves. I know how awful it sounds, my writing this advice. But there it is. Not that I listen to such advice as much as I should, if it all. But I'm being driven by a desperate need for acceptance and love. Surely, you can do better than that. I know that more and more pressure is put on writers to "market" themselves, and so self shout-outs might be required of today's writer. I know most writers feel "oogie" about it and doing it sucks a little bit of the joy out of an acceptance. One way to combat such a feeling is to shout-out other people's acceptances. Maybe we can start a project so that I'll shout-out your acceptances and you can shout-out mine. Trust me. You'll have a much easier job than I will.
   

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And that's all I got. Finally, I'll leave with suggestion seven, a bonus one. I sometimes send my stories out at night just so I can say to my wife, when she asks what I've been up to, "Nocturnal Submissions." It's not much of a joke, I know, but it's good to begin the process with something of a laugh.

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