Still reeling from the news cycle, but the advice I took away from my trusty meditation app today was to soften into acceptance/resistance, rather than tensing up and making myself crazy, or giving up and crumbling away into some useless ball of powdery nothing.

So, returning to “my little life” with hopes that some of this will inspire others who are also playing (or thinking about playing) “The Submissions Game”–and it really does help to think of it as a game unless you are someone who can’t stand losing, here are my stats for 2025.

In poetry, my biggest focus, 17 journals accepted 28 poems. Of these, 13 of the journals were new to me, and 4 I’d been published in before. Of the poems, 4 were accepted on the first try, 8 had been rejected less than 5 times, 7 less than 10 times, 7 others had been rejected less than 15 times, and 2 were rejected less than 20 times (I generally stop submitting a poem when it hits 20 rejections.)

As for poetry rejections, the grand number was 83, with 25 submissions from 2025 still outstanding.

Short stories and essays, as usual, were less successful, with one acceptance (of a story that had previously been rejected 12 times.) I could also count two of the poems accepted as “flash fiction,” as they were prose poems that bordered on both genres.

Two other stories were rejected 14 times combined, and the essays I submitted were rejected 9 times.

I did get 2 “send more” or “made final round” notes with my fiction/essay submissions. Three essay/fiction submissions from 2025 are still outstanding.

Bigger projects also made little headway. A chapbook I’ve been circulating got 7 rejections. (And 3 more in the first week of 2026). One submission from 2025 is still outstanding.

I didn’t spend too much energy submitting my piano memoir this year, as most of the time I fretted over conflicting advice on how to revamp it into more of a self-help book. Two revisions later, at the end of December, it became clear to me that the new format wasn’t working so I went back to the original version and sent that to seven small press just before New Year’s Day. So far I’ve only heard back from one: a rejection.

I also haven’t done too much with the eleven novels in the drawer, but I did send one of them to three agents. One ghosted me, one answered with a scam offer, and one was nice enough to write an actual letter of rejection. It’s still out at one small press.

So, my grand total of overall rejections for 2025 was 134–well surpassing my goal of 100!

And I’m hitting the ground at a good rate for 2026, with 6 rejections in the first two weeks–that’s like a rejection almost every other day! But two nice things, as well: an acceptance of a poem from a new journal, and notification from a journal that I was accepted in last year that my poem had won one of their prizes, which comes with a cash award and a Pushcart Prize nomination.

https://pngimg.com/image/54797

As I’ve said before, while I’m compelled to keep getting my work out there–mostly so more people will read it than for any uncontrollable need for outside validation–I find I can soften into thinking of this as nothing more than a game I play with myself. So, if you’re interested in offering your work (and totally fine, if you’re not) I encourage you not to take the process too seriously, and certainly not as a judgment on the quality of your writing.

Now onto doing my part to change the world. If only I could approach that with the same softness and ease! Of course, the stakes are much higher!

Subscribe at https://ddinafriedman.substack.com

Nicolás Espinosa, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Recently I ran into an old acquaintance I knew through writing many years ago. She told me that she’d submitted a few essays to a few places and when they got rejected she gave up. It’s such a familiar story. I probably hear a similar version of it from someone nearly every month or two. But while I can’t counteract the argument that submitting work is a drain on time that might be more enjoyably spent on other things, I urge folks to expand their view of what it means to be rejected.

This week, I got the following letter from ONLY POEMS, a magazine with a 1.61% acceptance rate.

Thank you so much for trusting us with your wonderful poem. Although we‘re passing on this submission, I wanted to let you know that we received almost 600 poems for the Poem of the Month and your poem was in my Top 30.

I know “Meditating in a Heat Wave” will find a wonderful home soon, and I welcome you to share it when it does. I’d love to see it published, and also consider sharing it on our socials.

I sincerely hope you’ll try us again for our next Poem of the Month call.We will open again with a new themed call feature soon. Keep an eye out for that!

I’d also like to invite you to submit for our Poet of the Week series.  We’re also forever open for our new features: short poems, ekphrastic, and poets howl. Learn about them through our Submittable page/website/Substack.

Wow!

Out of 600 poems, mine was in the top 30! That’s pretty darn good. Problem is, for this particular call, they were going to only publish one poem. We need to stop thinking zero-sum game here, and get out of the “sports team metaphor” that if you don’t win the championship, you’ve failed. What’s even more important than my “ranking” is that my work touched these editors to the point of saying that if the poem eventually gets published in another journal, they would consider sharing it on their social media sites, extending legitimacy to my work through their good name, and enhancing its reach through their 37.8K followers on Instagram.

Of course, I’m now psyched to submit to ONLY POEMS again, but whether or not they ever publish my work, I’ll be forever grateful to their generosity in taking the time to write this letter, rebunking the insidious inner critic who lives in all of us and delights in promoting the falsehood that rejection means we are bad writers, bad people, worthless, useless, blah, blah, blah, blah.

So while the submission game may not be for everyone, I’m determined to keep playing it. The odds may be about the same, but it’s a lot cheaper than going to a casino, and the “prizes”–even when they’re rejection letters, are a lot longer lasting than whatever money might come tumbling out of a slot machine.

Subscribe at https://ddinafriedman.substack.com