We’re nine days into 2025, and it’s already full of exhausting levels of controversy before we’ve even had a turnover in power in my home country of the United States. We’ve seen resignations of world leaders, wars continuing and getting worse and worse (you know where), the owner of Twitter continuing his tirade of lunacy and demonstrating why the billionaire class is not to be revered, California ablaze with a horrendous and large wildfire, right wing thinktanks developing plans to out and attack Wikipedia editors as any fascist-friendly organization would do, Meta rolling out and rolling back GenAI profiles on its platforms, and, just yesterday, the same Meta announcing sweeping changes to its moderation policies that, in a charitable reading, encourage hate-based harassment and abuse of vulnerable populations, promotion and support for disinformation, and other problems, all of which are so profound that people are talking about a mass exodus from the platform to…somewhere. It’s that last thing that brings me back to the blog today. Since the takeover at Twitter, social networks have been in a state of chaos. Platforms have risen and fallen — or only risen so much — and nothing I would call stability has formed. Years ago, I (and many others far more popular than me) remarked that we’ve ceded the territory of self-owned or small-scale third party spaces for massive third party platforms where we have minimal to no control or say and which can be stripped away in a tech-scale heartbeat. By putting all our ducks into a bin of unstable chaos, we’re also expending our time and energy on something that won’t last, requiring us to expend more time and energy finding alternatives, rebuilding communities, and then repeating the process again. In the present environment, that’s impossible to ignore.1 This is all rather reductive, but this post is not the place to talk about all the ways that social networks have impacted control over our own spaces and narratives. Another time, perhaps. I similarly don’t have space to talk about the fact that some of the platforms we currently have, however functional they may be, have placed many of us in a moral quagmire, as in the case of Meta’s recent moderation changes. Another time… ↩
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9 Responses
Why/what was rejected? I'm new to the blog.
My short story entitled "Artemis." Sorry if that wasn't clear :P.
I don't know if it's a good thing to post these rejections. I never do personally.
My theory is that if an agent or editor reads your blog, they'll see you getting rejected all the time, which can't be good for perception (even though it happens to all of us).
Rather, just post your acceptances
Jordan, I don't think it would look bad to an editor if he went on your blog and saw that you were getting a lot of rejections. It means that you are prolific and have tenacity to keep trying. This is what any person would know!
BTW, I had a rej myself today and the editor had no time to comment on any of the billion submissions they reject each day.
christina,
If all you ever post are rejections, an editor might assume that you are prolific and determined… but producing crap.
I'd rather an editor believe that I was less prolific, but producing nothing but gems. It's a perception issue.
Jordan: Bradbury had over 800 rejections before his first publication. I'm not particularly bothered by rejection. I keep writing, keep submitting, etc. Plus, not all of my stuff has been rejections. I have two honorable mentions in WOTF :P. That's good stuff to have.
I get your point, though. I suspect that at some point I'll stop doing these when it becomes overwhelming. Right now it's manageable, but pretty soon it's going to be impossible to keep updating without flooding my blog :S.
True enough about Bradbury and others. However, they didn't take out classified ads in a national paper to advertise that fact, did they? 🙂
Honorable Mentions in WotF are certainly an accomplishment, and there's no doubt that you can write, judging by the quality of this blog. Otherwise I wouldn't bother commenting on it. 😀
But you know that most reputations are built mainly of smoke and mirrors, right? Reality is ugly. Why broadcast it?
Because people need to face the fact that even good writers get rejected (assuming I'm good, obviously). And it sets an example, I think. Some folks get all butthurt about rejections. I clearly don't. That's a good thing, I think, and if a few new writers take after me and realize that rejections are just part of the publishing game, then that's for the better.
To each his own then. Keep up the good work.