Last night I got a rejection from a well-respected Canadian literary journal I submitted several poems to. I had been holding out a lot of hope that they would accept my work, so the initial excitement of receiving an email from them was swiftly replaced by a crushing sense of disappointment. Since I've had some writing successes in the past few months, however, I feel like I was able to dust myself off more quickly than usual.
This morning I checked the stats on my Poetic Parenting blog and did a double-take. Over the past week, I've had over 10, 000 page views on my site (usually it's a few hundred). I know most of the traffic is coming from people who have read my article about deciding to have only one child and are now curious about the rest of my work. When I dig deeper into the numbers, I see that some of my old blog posts have been read by 900 people recently. It boggles my mind and takes the sting out of the rejection notices and deafening silence that sometimes accompany my queries.
It also lets me know what's resonating with readers, and what's not. Thank you again to everyone who supports my writing career, likes my posts and shares my articles. I never thought I'd get the opportunity to explore it and chase it the way I have in the past year. You give me the encouragement to keep going and keep striving for even more. Thanks for reading.
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