Ten Years of Rejectomancy: Year Seven – The Whiplash Effect

There’s a phenomena in baseball and other professional sports where a player, usually a rookie, has a fantastic inaugural season, goes into the next season with massive expectations, and then, well, puts up mediocre numbers to huge surprise and disappointment. This is often called a sophomore slump, but I’ve always thought of it as the whiplash effect. It’s so hard to be at the top of your game on a consistent basis, largely because there’s a fair amount of luck involved in that kind of success, so regression is almost inevitable. When it happens, it can shake you up, make you doubt yourself, and wonder if your success was just a fluke. That’s what 2021 and year seven of necromancy was for me. Not a terrible year, but compared to the lofty heights of 2020, certainly a disappointment.

So, let’s have a look at Rejectomancy Year Seven.

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Total stats for 2021. 

I was definitely productive in 2021, and it was the third time in my career that I exceeded 100 submissions in a year. The other results, however, were not so great. I managed a fairly meager sub 10% acceptance rate, less than half what I achieved the year before. I did make a fair number of sales, and even a few pro sales, but I struggled to sell anything longer than flash, which I’ll detail a bit more below. I wouldn’t call 2021 a bad year, but it was certainly a disappointing year.

Here are all my acceptances for 2021.

I landed 12 total acceptances in 2021, and if you look, you’ll see a lot of my usual suspects. Three stories to The Arcanist, two to Flash Point SF, and a smattering to other markets I’d sold to before and continue to sell to today. The new kids on the block were Wyldblood and Shotgun Honey, and 2021 marked my first acceptances with these markets. So, not a bad a year in terms of sales, but it was a struggle year, and let me see if I can explain why.

Twelve sales out of 102 submissions isn’t awful, but I can definitely remember struggling in 2021. As I look back at my submission record, it’s easy to see why. A lot of close-but-no-cigar submissions, and often for the same story. For example, “The Downer”, which I eventually sold to On Spec, received 16 rejections before that sale, many of them in 2021. Another story, “When Gods Walk” racked up 13 rejections before I sold it to Radon Journal in 2023. It, too, received many of these rejections in 2021. The list goes on, and it seemed to be a year of getting close, but not close enough. Timing is a big deal in this business, and selling a story is all about right time, right publisher, right editor. I just couldn’t line all those tumblers up in 2021.

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And that’s Rejectomancy Year Seven. Quite the let down from year six, but overall not a bad year, and a far cry from my worst. THAT year is looming on the horizon, and we’ll get to it soon. 🙂

If you’ve missed any of my Ten Years of Rejectomancy posts and want to catch up, here are the links to the others in the series.

1. Ten Years of Rejectomancy: The Pre-Blog Years
2. Ten Years of Rejectomancy: Year One – To Pro or Not to Pro
3. Ten Years of Rejectomancy: Year Two- Maybe I’m Good at This?
4. Ten Years of Rejectomancy: Year Three – Maybe I’m NOT Good at This?
5. Ten Years of Rejectomancy: Year Four – Back On Track!
6. Ten Years of Rejectomancy: Year Five – Consistency is Key
7. Ten Years of Rejectomancy: Year Six – Best Year EVAR!

Thoughts or opinions about Rejectomancy Year Seven? Tell me about it in the comments.