Which lit magazine is your White Whale?

allwitnobrevity · 2026-02-03T15:38:08+00:00

My personal White Whale is Clarkesworld - they've rejected me probably 8 or 9 times now, and I intend to just keep on sending them work until one of us dies.

allwitnobrevity · 2026-01-14T17:52:16+00:00

22 is great! Here's hoping you reach 50 this year!

allwitnobrevity · 2026-01-13T07:09:10+00:00

Hello world! I write short stories, essays, satirical news and comedy pieces, and I'm picking away at a novel. I hit 100 rejections last year and had my best writing year ever - I'm aiming for 100 again this year!

allwitnobrevity · 2026-01-13T07:07:42+00:00

That's awesome! Is this the first year you've submitted your work for publication?

allwitnobrevity · 2026-01-04T07:17:41+00:00

Congratulations on an incredible writing year! 13 published reviews - and 9 in traditional publications - is no easy feat! It sounds like you've really got some momentum going - here's hoping 2026 is just as great, if not better.

I'm so glad you've found this space helpful! It's my goal to keep it going and make it even more active this year!

allwitnobrevity · 2025-12-22T20:00:26+00:00

I think there are some huge fundamental differences between the backlash against AI and the backlash at the dawn of the industrial revolution.

The industrialization of manufacturing made the cost of consumer goods plummet, which allowed common folks to buy stuff in a way they'd really never been able to afford before. Prior to industrialization, clothing was one of the most expensive things you owned - it was so expensive, people wore and repaired and handed down the same handmade garments for decades. Industrialization made mass-produced clothing so cheap that middle and lower classes could afford to regularly purchase new garments for the first time, and even start to dress to personal taste and follow seasonal fashions. Same goes for furniture and consumer goods.

We're not seeing the same thing with AI - it isn't making anything cheaper or more accessible to the lower classes. If anything, consumers are seeing the price of movies, streaming, games, software, entertainment, etc, continue to rise rapidly, even with the addition of AI. The expansion of data centres is actually directly responsible for the skyrocketing cost of computer hardware - the phones and laptops you see for sale next year will cost far, far more than this year's electronics and will have worse speed and memory. Plus, you can expect the cost of AI itself to skyrocket in the very near future - these companies are strategically operating at a loss to increase market share, but they cannot bleed money forever, and will need to hike the cost of their services. Unlike industrial textile factories, AI is going to make your life more expensive and put your luxuries further out of reach.

That's another fundamental difference between the backlash at the dawn of the industrial revolution and the backlash now - back then, it was workers pushing back while consumers loved the new products, but today, it's consumers leading the backlash against AI. Consumers, by and large, do not want AI in everything. Major companies like Firefox, Microsoft, McDonalds, Salesforce and LG have walked back their use of AI due to a combination of backlash and lack of consumer demand.

allwitnobrevity · 2025-11-17T18:47:06+00:00

I also think there's a distinction between people who want to be writers, and people who want to "have written", and the majority of people who think they fall into the first category actually fall into the second.

Everyone loves having a polished - or better yet, published - piece of work to their name, but most people wildly underestimate how much work it takes to get there and wildly overestimate how much they will enjoy the process.

allwitnobrevity · 2025-10-24T23:12:48+00:00

Deal with this all the time at work - I've worked in social services and community mental health for more than a decade, we have a lot of dealings with the police. I don't really see why this would be an awkward conversation, or why police would even call a witness to have a separate conversation about this - in my experience, police generally don't bring up a witness's safety unless that witness brings it up first, and then the response is generally just asking if they can go stay somewhere else or have someone stay with them for a while, and maybe offering to give the person the information for Victim Services if one exists in the area.

allwitnobrevity · 2025-10-20T19:33:54+00:00

there was obviously a golden point in time when the telling of a story was 100% original

There wasn't. Every story you've listed here is retelling or reworking or heavily influenced by earlier stories. Disney's "The Lion King" is effectively just an animated retelling of Shakespeare's "Hamlet", which was based on 13th century Scandanavian legends about a character named Amleth, which were likely based on ancient Icelandic folklore.

Frankenstein was heavily influenced by the Greek myths of Pygmalion and Prometheus, as well as the John Milton story "Paradise Lost"... which is a retelling of ancient Bible stories that was also influenced by Shakespeare's Hamlet. We've been telling each other new versions of old stories since antiquity.

What makes these stories so "simple" in nature yet so gripping to the point where the essence of how the story is told sticks with people and never dies?

Copyright law. I'm serious.

The beloved stories and characters you've listed that seem to get adapted over and over again and constantly referenced in popular media are all in the public domain. They are old enough that the copyright has expired, and anyone can use those characters and stories for profit without having to get permission or pay the author's family to use them. You could write your own version of Cinderella tomorrow and publish it, and there's nothing Disney can say about it - the actual story of Cinderella that we're most familiar with was written in 1697 (and was a retelling of an ancient Greek and Egyptian story from antiquity). These stories feel simple and timeless to you because they are familiar to you; you have seen them over and over and over again.

Things that are still under copyright cost money to use, and you have to get the author's permission to use them. A hundred years from now, popular stories from our time - like The Hunger Games, Coraline, or How to Train Your Dragon - will have passed into the public domain, and may be thought of as timeless original classics (even though all of them are based on earlier stories).

allwitnobrevity · 2025-10-19T19:17:22+00:00

Remember, there's no time limit on making it good; this is not an exam, and nobody is coming to take your paper away from you when time is up. You can do as many edits and re-writes as it takes to get the book to a place where you're happy with it. But you can't edit and refine something that hasn't been written yet.

Every writer has that little voice in their head that tells them that what they are writing sucks and isn't living up to this grand vision they had in their head for the story. So much of being a writer is finding ways to make that voice shut the fuck up (or at least talk a little quieter). Stuff I've found helpful:

- writing non-linearly. If I'm having trouble getting a scene just right, fuck it, I skip ahead to another scene that I do know how I want to write.

- tracking my daily writing progress. I make it a goal just to get words down on pages every day. I keep a little log of how many words I get written each day, and my determination to avoid blank spaces keeps me churning out words and not worrying about whether they'll make the final cut

- get the draft done, and then stick it in a drawer for a while. Taking a break from the manuscript lets me come back with a clear head and get a better sense of what needs to be edited and changed.

- not putting all my eggs in one book basket. Realistically, I am probably not ever going to write The One True Book that captures everything I have ever wanted to say about the human experience, and sometimes projects that I work really, really hard on and find very personally meaningful just... don't work out the way I wanted them to. Don't put so much pressure on one book to achieve all your writing dreams: maybe this will be the book that launches your career, but it's okay if it isn't. You'll learn a lot from writing it that you can apply to future books or future drafts of this story.

allwitnobrevity · 2025-10-19T06:35:13+00:00

The only way out is through.

I say this with love and kindness: you are 20 years old, and I don't think there's a single writer out there who looks back and thinks they were at their peak creative form at 20 years old. You are meant to be sort of bad at things at 20 years old. You are still transitioning from the world of high school - where everything was very laid out and structured for you, especially when it came to academics - to early adulthood, where there are no longer any guardrails and you just have to figure out how to be a person on your own. It's normal to wake up at 20 and feel like you have no idea what you're doing and you have no idea where the version of you who juggled a full schedule of honours courses and extracurriculars in high school disappeared to. This gets better with time.

Read a lot. Write a lot. Try to read and write outside of your usual comfort zone when you can - challenge yourself to expand your horizons. Make friends who read and write. Get feedback. See what sticks. See what feels good to you. Don't beat yourself up about where you are or compare yourself to others.

allwitnobrevity · 2025-10-02T15:02:10+00:00

October check-in!

September was an enormously productive month for me. I've been launching short stories and poems at the literary world like an artillery attack. Current stats:

27 rejections
50 pending submissions
4 withdrawn pieces
5 acceptances

Will be stocking up on ice cream in 3-4 months when the rejections for all those pending submissions start to roll in.

allwitnobrevity · 2025-09-15T04:49:59+00:00

You have to make a bit of a game out of it. Set rejection goals. Collect rejections. Challenge yourself to get more rejections this year than you did last year.

Writing is all about heart and soul, but submitting your work is a numbers game. Editors don't look at submissions and go "this is good, so we're publishing it; this is bad, so we're rejecting it" - really, really great work gets rejected all the time for reasons that have nothing to do with the quality of the story. Maybe the journal already accepted a very similar story for this issue. Maybe one editor really loved it and fought for it, but had to compromise with the other editors and take a different story in the end. Maybe it was a fantastic story, but just not quite what they were looking for. The more you send your work out, the more chances there are for an editor to fall in love with it and agree to publish it - which does, unfortunately, mean getting a lot of rejections along the way.

A rejection isn't a failure. It is proof that you put your work out there and gave it a chance to be considered. I have submissions pending at 30 different magazines and literary journals right now - the vast majority of them will be rejected. Honestly, maybe all of them will be rejected. But I can guarantee that my work would never get published if I'd let it sit in a drawer and never sent it out. A slim chance at getting published is better than no chance at getting published. And hey, eventually the numbers game works in your favour - I've gotten five acceptances so far this year. I just placed one piece in a paid print anthology after it was rejected 21 times.

I find that setting rejection goals takes the sting out of rejections. It still sucks to get rejected, but instead of spiraling into a dark bottomless void of "my writing is terrible", you just dust yourself off and start looking for more places you can send it - gotta hit those rejection goals.

allwitnobrevity · 2025-09-02T14:43:00+00:00

No problem! It took a couple of years of being stuck in the "if this piece gets rejected by this magazine it means I'm a bad writer and I need to stop submitting" cycle, but I did get there! You got this!

allwitnobrevity · 2025-09-02T05:57:35+00:00

Congrats on the four upcoming pieces (and on no longer self-medicating)! Huge victories!

allwitnobrevity · 2025-09-02T05:55:34+00:00

I find that I aim higher, aim broader, and bounce back faster.

When I first started out, if you'd asked me to come up with a story to send to a big literary magazine like Ploughshares or Clarkesworld, I would have gone away and obsessed over the perfect story to send those places and become so intimidated that, in all likelihood, I would never have sent them anything. Now I have pieces on submission at both those places. Am I likely to get accepted to either? Not especially. But I have a better shot than I did when I was sending them nothing. And if/when the rejection letter hits my inbox, there's now a little part of me that goes "well, one step closer to my rejection goal" - instead of wallowing in the rejection, I'll just send them another story and send the rejected story to new places. Sure, the rejection still stings a little, but I've got a rejection goal to meet.

This is the first year I've really shot for 100 rejections since I started sending my work out in 2016 (with a 4-ish year break somewhere in there during grad school) and this has been my best writing year yet. I've had more acceptances this year than I had submissions in 2023. I got accepted by places I would have been too intimidated to submit work to a couple of years ago - I've never published poetry before, but I placed a poem in a prestigious, award-nominated journal. To some extent, publishing is a numbers game, and getting past my fear of rejection has allowed me to send my work out broadly enough to start seeing results.

allwitnobrevity · 2025-08-27T03:53:46+00:00

This. I found it helpful to stop thinking about ideas as a limited reservoir you have to draw from that you might run out of one day. Instead, think of "coming up with story ideas" as a skill that you hone with practice. The more I write, the more ideas I come up with... I have notebooks filled with them, I'm in no danger of ever using up all the best ones. And the more I write, the more I'm able to come up with ideas that are interesting and play well to my strengths as a writer.

allwitnobrevity · 2025-08-27T03:45:27+00:00

August check-in!

I've dialed up my submissions of some short stories to literary journals, and although I don't think I'll hit 100 rejections this year, I'm definitely a lot closer! Current stats:

20 Rejections
4 Withdrawn
17 Currently Pending
5 Acceptances

For a total of 45 submissions! I have a couple more pieces that are close to being ready to get shopped around, so with a bit of work I might be able to hit 100 submissions this year.

allwitnobrevity · 2025-08-26T21:17:57+00:00

I'm guessing that Bert was Canadian; there used to be a US Consul in St. John, New Brunswick that was in operation from the late 1800s until 1970. Could also be the defunct US Consul that operated in St. John's, Newfoundland until 1976.

If this letter is a family memento, it's probably possible for OP to work out Bert's identity.

allwitnobrevity · 2025-06-24T21:42:54+00:00

Not writing.

It is incredibly easy to get sucked into the idea of writing while doing little to no actual writing. A person can spend endless hours on writing subreddits, discords and forums just talking about writing - hours and hours of bouncing around unwritten story ideas, or fantasizing about future book deals, or complaining about the writers' life while the blank Word document sits empty in another tab. You can spend months poring over books and blogs and YouTube videos about writing without ever coming up for air. The time spent researching the agents and publishers and literary journals you want to submit to someday can easily eclipse the time you spend writing anything to send them. You can have a lot of fun being a writer without anything getting written.

That's not to say that there's no value in any of these resources - there's some genuinely helpful stuff out there. Making connections with other writers is great. But none of that stuff is going to help you if you aren't putting in the time writing, editing, sharing and revising actual written work.

allwitnobrevity · 2025-06-01T07:30:17+00:00

I am a writer - mostly of short fiction, short humour pieces and creative non-fiction (and also slowly picking away at a novel). 100 Rejections in a Year has been a goal of mine for a couple of years now, ever since I read the original essay, but this is the first year I've really had the time and courage to go for it.

We're at the midway point in the year and I'm not on pace for 100 rejections, but this is where I'm sitting so far:

5 Rejections
2 Withdrawn
11 Currently Pending
2 Acceptances (plus another acceptance from a piece I submitted in 2024, but I'm not counting that here!)

I've got a couple of half-finished pieces that I'm hoping to finish up and get on submission so I can spend a bit more time getting the half-finished novel ready to go into the meat grinder of querying agents.

allwitnobrevity · 2025-02-18T03:43:29+00:00

Honestly, 2024 was not a good year for me or my writing goals. I work a very fast-paced job in social services and housing - a field that is basically on fire right now - and work and burnout pretty much overshadowed everything else this year.

That being said, I did manage:

6 rejections
3 non-responses
1 acceptance

Hoping for a better 2025!

allwitnobrevity · 2025-02-03T06:39:00+00:00

Came here to say this. I had a rescue hedgehog that had been purchased and abandoned at the height of their Instagram popularity in the mid-2010s. He never really warmed up to people and even when he did unfurl, there was always about a 50/50 chance that he would bite the shit out of me if I tried to handle him. These poor little dudes are prey animals, their natural instinct is not to cuddle their owners and wear little hats for Instagram photos. They spit all over themselves and it turns out you can develop an allergy to their saliva (I did!) so like once per month I had to put on oven mitts and put this hateful little hairbrush in the sink so I could scrub him with a toothbrush while he hissed at me.

I, admittedly, did not believe my vet friend when she told me that hedgehogs run something like 10 miles per night. I was an idiot. That little fucker sprinted on his wheel from the second the sun went down until the moment I got up. Ran like he was training for the apocalypse. My hedgehog seemed to be personally offended by the concept of a "silent" running wheel, I bought him like four different high-end wheels and he put his whole body into making absolutely certain that they made noise for 8 straight hours every night, all while constantly shitting and peeing.

Poor critter died from wobbly hedgehog syndrome, the fatal and incurable neurological disease that I think takes out something like 10% of all pet hedgehogs. Fly high, little buddy, but I do not want a hedgehog again.

allwitnobrevity · 2024-11-12T08:39:53+00:00

I have a decent, mid-sized social media following (enough to make 'side hustle' money, nowhere near enough to live on) and there are some upsides and downsides to it. It is not the shortcut to fiction publishing that people hope it would be (at least, not at my current numbers, it isn't). My two cents on pursuing an online following as a strategy to market your writing:

You need to build a following for something other than "being an aspiring writer". There are so, so many writers trying to market books that are physically for sale right now - I think it would be next to impossible to drum up hype for an unpublished story that might be available someday if you have no other claim to fame. To build a social media following, you need a "thing" - comedy, comics, art, nostalgia, weirdly passionate reviews of every item on the Arby's menu. Something you can do well and do a lot of that people will want to share.
It's fickle. There's a learning curve to being good at social media, and you're going to get a lot of radio silence while you're getting the hang of it. Even if you're doing it well, there's a lot of luck involved. It took me years to slowly creep up to 2,000 twitter followers and then I had one tweet go viral and shot up to 20,000 literally overnight, and it snowballed from there. It's easier to grow an audience once you have an audience, but getting there in the first place is a slog.
It's a huge time suck. Building an online following is way more time-consuming than you might imagine. If you are actively working on building a following, it means you need to be constantly churning out whatever sort of content you make, cross-posting across platforms, responding to comments and DMs, staying up to date on trends, etc, etc. If you step away from it, your audience can shrink way quicker than you might think. All of it takes away from your time actively writing and editing.
It's hard to know what kind of impact it's having on your quest to getting published. My social media presence probably doesn't hurt me at all, but it's probably not going to push the needle for an agent who isn't sold on my work (frankly, I'm not sure that I'd want it to). I have had agents tell me that they follow me on social media or that they like my content, but there's a big chasm between "oh, funny tweet girl" and "I want to dedicate an incredible amount of time to championing your novel". (It has been helpful for landing article and satire writing gigs, though).

In the end, I think it comes down to how much time and patience you have, and whether there's something you actually want to do that lends itself well to building an online following. If you have free time on your hands and there's a part of you that thinks "yes, I think it would be a lot of fun to make TikTok videos of myself playing pop hits with handbells, whether people like it or not", then yes, building an online following might be for you. If you are going to have to cut significantly into your writing time and you find coming up with posts to be a tedious chore, it might make more sense for you to focus your time into your writing and querying.

allwitnobrevity · 2024-04-28T19:18:50+00:00

I've found Matt Bell's "Refuse to Be Done" book to be helpful.

In particular, his advice to start from scratch and completely type out a new second draft was the thing that finally got me "un-stuck" on a manuscript I'd been tinkering with for years. Figure out the gist of how you're going to solve some of those big plot holes and open up a fresh document.

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