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 early to mid 2000s that I could write a short story quickly and get it accepted almost immediately at one of the many online crime fiction zines and soon after get that dopamine hit of publication and feedback. It was intoxicating, but it’s also toxic for anyone who wants to move to the next level and publish novels because writing novels takes a lot of sustained work over long periods of time where there is little to no reward.

After making a name for myself early on in the short crime fiction field, I was eager to make it to the next level and accomplished that with my first two novels in 2015 and 2016. Then I wanted to level up even more by writing something more complex and sophisticated than the short, pulpy stream of conscious novels I’d been writing. And that’s where I’ve been stuck for the last 8 years or so with very little reward. So as the new year dawned and I was struggling with my current novel, I decided to chase that quick dopamine hit.

Instead of writing one of the more complex and layered short stories I’d been having success with lately, I was impatient and reverted to my old ways and knocked out some stories that were little more than vibes and violence. The stories aren’t bad, but I didn’t take them seriously enough and I didn’t take the markets I was submitting to seriously enough and just assumed it would be like it was in the old days where I could get an easy acceptance anywhere I wanted.

Ooops.

I was talking to my therapist about this and told him I was happy they were rejected though because it forced me to acknowledge why I’d written them in the first place and refocus my attention and efforts on finishing a goddam novel finally.

Our society is in the dumpster fire it’s in right now in large part because we’ve lost our ability to do deep, sustained work and thinking. We need immediate hits and immediate success and give no thought to the future or to sustainability.

Hopefully we can reverse course on this and get back to being a society capable of being alone with our thoughts for a while and being able to think critically and complexly not just so we can write good novels and have an audience of readers who can appreciate good novels, but because short attention spans are the single biggest contributors to authoritarianism. When society needs quick and simple answers, authoritarians tell them what they want and how they want to hear it. They don’t bother with nuance or context or consequences.

So don’t be like me. Fight back with your mind. Appreciate boredom and silence. Wallow in complexity and ignore the constant craving for immediate fixes and success. We’ll all be better for it.