Keep writing stories, and keep sending them out

I learned today that Tor.com has two different form rejections, one a little less form than the other, and that's the one I got today.

Along with the regrets that the short story they read wasn't quite what they were looking for, and luck sending it elsewhere, it includes the line "Please send us more of your work in the future."

I read an interesting article not long ago about the gender split of story submission behavior. It claimed that men, when they receive an encouragement like that, try to follow up as soon as possible (some markets want a gap between your submissions, as a for instance, a week, a month, etc.) and women will sometimes wait up to 6 months, if they submit to that market again at all.

I'm not sure how true it is. I'm not saying it isn't true either. I honestly don't know.

There are a lot of women writers getting published out there. The women who are successful, or becoming successful, could not possibly have been such shrinking violets when it came to submitting their stories. They had to have kept trying, kept sending them out (or been so goddamn brilliant they got published the first time out. I'm sure that happens to some people as well).

And then there's this blog post on The Missouri Review about perseverance (Okay, "stubborn" might get bandied about a bit). I feel like writers who are successful even a little, they persevere. They get the rejection and go "Okay, where can I send this next". Or, "What changes do I need to make so that this becomes a better story?"  I try to do both of these. I've been submitting stories for ten years or so by now and have had one acceptance. It isn't like I'm going to stop writing, so I need to keep being stubborn.

Onwards and upwards, my friends.

Excuse me, is your brain fluid leaking? Well hadn't you ought to stop it?

In recent years, I've seen not one, but two! instances of somebody whose leaky nose turned out to be brain fluid. I don't think it's unreasonable to be alarmed about such a thing.  I mean, really, brain juice should stay in your brain. This is one of those incontrovertible personal truths, like preferring your blood to also stay on the inside. Apparently, your cereobrospinal fluid can also leak out of your ear. Isn't this delightful?

I mean really, in this most recent incident of SCSFLS (spontaneous cerebrospinal fluid leak syndrome, because everything needs an acronym), the man's nose had been running for eighteen months. I guess intermittently, one would think. Perhaps temporarily cleared by blowing his nose? I have no idea. It freaks me out. Especially because in the most recent incident, the patient also ended up with meningitis, perhaps because whatever it is that normally keeps one's brain juice in had been compromised, allowing for the entrance of bacteria.

In the prior incident I read about, the woman had only let it go on for four months, rather than eighteen. Her leak seemed worse, granted, but I wonder if this kind of thing is also representative of who is willing to say, pick things up that got knocked on the floor, and who just hopes those things will go away or get taken care of by somebody else?

But, I digress. There are other symptoms that go with SCSFLS like tinnitis and vertigo (and, y'know, a disproportionate amount of not-snot coming out of your nose). It's apparently a rare thing, but it's alarming enough to make me wish there was a test kit you could get at Walgreens. You know they have a section by the pharmacy where you can buy paternity test kits and drug test kits? The pregnancy tests, though, they leave those by the condoms. Which are also in the sock aisle. Again, I'll let you draw your own conclusion regarding the significance of that detail. But would it be a bad idea, to have a cerebrospinal fluid test kit? I think it would be worth the peace of mind, if you don't have a cold, don't have allergies, and you're on week three of nasal weeping with no health insurance in sight.

I wondered about the treatment of SCSFLS and spent a moment starting to Google that. Then, in this abstract here, I noticed one of the methods mentioned was "Gelfoam" and that made me think of the Fix a Flat stuff that you inflate/seal your flat tire with long enough to get to a gas station or whatever. And I figured I was about done.