2012 was a little bit of a dry year for me, story sale-wise. There were a couple of very high points – I sold Line and Orbit and I finally got something into Clarkesworld – but the overall number wasn’t all that high and there were a few markets I tried for repeatedly and never quite made it.

In the last 72 hours I’ve gotten acceptances from both Clarkesworld and Lightspeed. Which is kind of huge.

Am I writing better now? Sure. I like to think I’m getting better all the time. But that’s not all of it. Being good doesn’t guarantee you anything except that at some point someone will buy your stuff. The stars just sort of have to align. I’ve gotten more than one rejection that said “Look, this is great, but it just doesn’t fit what we want right now.”

You have dry periods followed by heavy rain followed by dry periods again, and they don’t operate according to any particular logic, at least not any that’s easy to discern or make sense of.

This is why I say that doing this requires psychotic levels of persistence. Also healthy degrees of blind faith. That sooner or later the rain will come.