It's Time to Move On

I had another short story rejected this week.

And yeah, I get it. Rejection is part of the process.

When you submit to literary magazines, you're trying to fit someone else's vision. Someone else's publication. Someone else's audience. Someone else's unwritten standards. Every editor is looking for something slightly different, and sometimes what you're writing simply isn't what they're looking for.

That's okay.

Some of my stories have found homes. Most haven't.

And honestly, I'm at peace with that. Because I know these are good stories.

More importantly, I know they matter.

The collection I've been working on consists of fictionalized stories informed by my real lived experience as a transgender woman. They're technically queer stories, but they aren't always the kind of queer stories people expect.

They aren't particularly pretty. They aren't carefully sanitized. They aren't designed to make anyone comfortable.

They're messy. They're complicated. They're sometimes ugly.

Just like real life.

The experiences I'm writing about actually happened. Maybe not exactly as written. Maybe not to the exact characters on the page. But every story contains truth. Real truth. The kind you earn by living long enough to collect scars.

I've written about sexual assault. I've written about being thrown out of a women's restroom while armed and having to decide what happened next. I've written about loneliness, rejection, fear, and survival. I’ve written about the real experiences of someone who doesn't always fit neatly into society's expectations.

These stories aren't interested in making a political statement. They're interested in telling the truth. And truth has a funny way of making people uncomfortable. Especially when it challenges the stories people tell themselves about the world.

For a while, I kept submitting them. Publication after publication. Rejection after rejection. Not because I needed validation, but because that's what writers do. You send the work out into the world and see what happens.

But lately I've realized something. I think it's time to move on.

Not from the stories. From the process.

The stories are finished. The stories say what I want them to say. The stories matter.

At some point, continuing to chase acceptance starts feeling less like persistence and more like procrastination.

The collection is coming. I've known that for a while. I've known these stories belong together. I've known they deserve to exist whether a literary magazine agrees with me or not.

So this morning, I'm going through them one by one. Making final edits. Tightening language. Cleaning up rough edges. Preparing them for the next step.

Because there are other stories waiting.

There's a novel sitting on my hard drive that's been demanding attention. A fictional encounter with Death that's been whispering to me for months now. And if I'm going to write that story, I need to let these stories go.

Not abandon them. Release them.

Set them free.

If literary magazines don't want them, that's fine. I'll publish them myself. I've done it before.

The publishing world likes to look down its nose at self-publishing sometimes, but honestly, I don't care. The readers who've found my work have responded in ways I never expected. They've cried. They've reached out. They've thanked me. They've told me that my words mattered.

At the end of the day, that's the only review that counts. Not an editor. Not a literary journal. Not a gatekeeper.

A reader.

So I'll put these stories into the world myself if I have to. I'll build the library I want to leave behind. I'll create the legacy I want to create. And eventually, one way or another, this writing thing is going to become my life.

Maybe not today. Maybe not next year. But it's coming.

Mark my motherfucking words.