I received two rejection emails from two different sites about poetry I submitted. I think the overall problem was that it wasn’t the right genre for their magazine. The magazines were general fiction with some fantasy and my poems were more normal poetry. Between the two magazines they only had five spots for poetry submissions so I’m not too heartbroken. After waiting for a few weeks though you hope that the email you receive is positive. I’ve still got the poems submitted to one other magazine that I really wanted them to belong too, a purely poetry magazine. So we’ll see what happens.
As for my fantasy works, I got to work a little more on “An Act of War” which is a short story set in ancient Etherea (Etherea is the setting for my novel The Shadowborn General) that goes into depth about the start of the Minotaur and Panterran wars. I’ve got a little over 2.4k words right now on the story and have it fleshed out pretty well, it has a good direction and will just require sit down time to finish it.
I’m almost ready to jump back on the “novel” horse and go back to editing “The Shadowborn General.” I left off editing it at chapter 10. I wanted to take some time away from it to soak in all that I learned from the critiques, re-approach the novel, and go over all the chapters again. Once I finish going through everything I’ll submit the last chapters for editing, rinse, and repeat. Hopefully by taking some time from the novel and applying what I learned from the first half to the last half, I’ll be able to push out a much better novel. Of course the goal is to publish it, but as I’ve said before I love writing for me. The story is something I want to be able to read and enjoy and continue to imagine about. Finishing it correctly will allow me to do that.
Good luck with your own writings!