Other than two rejections from Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, I haven’t had a short story rejected in more than fifteen years. I’ve had two this year already. That obviously hurts my confidence, but what’s worse is that I should have never written them in the first place. One of the reasons I haven’t had a rejection in so long is because for the last decade or so I haven’t been writing and submitting much short fiction because I was concentrating on novels.

I’d gotten to the point in the ...