Someone mentioned not long ago that I don’t discuss rejections very often at A Moving Line, my writing blog.

Why bother?

I don’t obsess over rejection notices, don’t keep a notebook full of them or tack them to the walls of my workspace. I’m not interested in how many times I fail, only whether or not I succeed.

No one likes to hear “No!” Tim Powers, the science fiction author, has told Writers of the Future winners that we write because we want to be noticed. I suspect he’s right, I know it’s true for me. And it’s damned difficult to get noticed if no one buys your work.

But you’re guaranteed never to get noticed, at least not for your written words, if you stop trying to get your stories in print because you’re afraid they will be rejected.

Frank Sinatra made a movie in 1959 called A Hole in the Head. It featured a song, High Hopes, that won the Academy Award that year for Best Original Song. It became one of his signature pieces.

Part of it goes:

Once there was a silly old ram,
Thought he’d punch a hole in a dam.
No one could make that ram scram;
He kept buttin’ that dam.

‘Cause he had high hopes, he had high hopes.
He had high apple pie, in the sky hopes.

I suspect that giving up, refusing to return to the keyboard because of a devastating rejection, is the biggest reason why so many folks remain talented wannabes, instead of working, published writers.

I have a hand-lettered sign taped to my computer monitor, right above eye level. It’s just a little-bitty thing, half an inch high and two inches long, but it’s always at the edge of my vision as I write. It has one word printed on it.

Persistence.

Here’s how the rest of that verse goes:

So any time your feelin’ bad, ‘stead of feelin’ sad;
Just remember that ram.
Oops, there goes a billion-kilowatt * dam.

I intend to spend the rest of my life, however long that may be, as a dam ram.

How about you?

* A terawatt is a trillion watts or a billion kilowatts.

K.C. Ball lives in Seattle, a stone’s throw from Puget Sound. She is an night writer, an afternoon sleeper, who works through the wee hours because there are so few interruptions and because that is when all the good air is.

Her short fiction has appeared in various online and print publications, including Flash Fiction Online, Every Day Fiction, Boston Literary Magazine, Big Pulp and Murky Depths.

Her flash fiction story, Hair of the Dog, was included in the 2008 Best of Every Day Fiction anthology and her story, Coward’s Steel, won third place in the 1st Quarter 2009 Writers of the Future competition. It will appear in the Writers of the Future XXVI anthology in August 2010.

K.C. is editor of 10Flash Quarterly, an online magazine featuring genre flash fiction, and she blogs about writing at A Moving Line.