Ouch

I was hoping today to be able to say I'd gotten a piano for free. All afternoon I kept my email open (not just for the piano but also because I'd listed a few things to sell on craigslist and was trying to work out those details with a potential buyer, which also fell through for today), and I spent a while calling around to get some friends to help move the piano... Well, I'm still hoping to get the piano later this week.

But instead what I got was a whole bunch of rejections. Five, that's right, five stories and poems in one afternoon (now granted, three of those were poems from one place). And I'd just had two stories rejected two days ago--all of these for respected, professional or nearly-so venues that had the submissions for longer than their usual or stated response times. When a place does that, it gets my hopes up. Now several of them were personalized rejections, which is nice both from the standpoint of getting ideas of how to strengthen a piece and because I'm getting personal rejections from major markets...but it's still a bit rough to have them all at once like this. So it goes.