Erika, In a row rejections are evil and I hate what they can do to your drive.

If it helps, I can tell you from reading for a magazine for over a year that the numbers are brutal and you should keep trying, keep writing new things, as much as you can, if that is what you want to do.

I know cold streaks happen, but this one seems exceptionally long and has left me feeling as though I don't know my own work.(I sent out a bunch of work over the last six months or so hoping to be desensitized, but it seems to have had the opposite effect.)

Maybe try something different? Write what means the most to you, instead of writing for a market, or write something you always told yourself you couldn't. Sometimes you just need to break out of a rut.

I don't know. It probably doesn't help that my life has barely two parts: writer/indigent(and not really the gritty Carver kind. I'm too weird to write normal things and yet? Not strange enough to get locked up and make "outsider art")ETA: Which I mention not to incite pity, but because it makes rejection extra crushing when there's not some part of your life where you're really satisfied to point to.

Well, okay, maybe I'm strange enough and haven't got caught yet.

Awesome, Sox!!

Ha, that sounds like awesomesauce. Awesome, Sox, you're awesomesauce.

Here's an attempt at one of the prompts...I don't write romantic things often. Maybe it's the date today. A middle-aged woman(although she would probably never call herself that, she knows she is. Probably, if not as ready for support hose as that phrase makes her feel) and a young man, arm in arm, step into the hotel suite they got for their anniversary. “Can you believe it’s been a whole year already?”

He nods, looking as proud and happy as she feels, but she likes it that he doesn’t jabber to fill the silence. All this joy from a relentless best friend playing with the age range on a dating site.

Who has two thumbs and a copy of April's Azimov's on her kindle?

Who has two thumbs and a copy of April's Azimov's on her kindle?

Kermit flail.

-t how'd you make me allergy from all the way across the country.

I'm a powerful irritant with a long range, I guess.

Excellent story, Sox. As I expected.