Rejection hurts. If it doesn’t hurt for you, you’re not only a writer unicorn, but a unicorn horned with melted coins from ancient Rome. Almost all of us, faced with rejection, react on a spectrum somewhere between spooning pints of ice cream over the sink to howling on a deserted beach to deciding you should just learn to do something practical, like cut hair.

We’re talking literary journals today, so let’s get perspective. Common acceptance rates for literary journals—of which I’ve edited three—tend to hover between one and three percent. That means it takes 97 rejections just to be normal. That much rejection likely won’t happen to you. Keep in mind, though, that with this level of sifting, most rejections have nothing to do with you but with that journal’s needs, backlog, and other inscrutables. One year my journal published back-to-back stories about animals. When we realized that, we promised ourselves no animals for two years. Your dog poem may be wonderful, but we can’t accept it…