11,000 Rejections on the Wall, 11,000 Rejections

We've talked about the long odds in this industry from time to time, bros and she-bros, and so I thought I'd use this Monday morning to 1.) give you a realistic idea of how difficult it is to get your work published, and 2.) relate an inspirational, true story of one man, his 100+ published short stories, and his, uh... 11,100 rejections.

Meet Jacob M. Appel. Dude is a doctor lawyer astronaut bounty hunter spy with seven degrees—an AB, two AMs, an MPhil, an MFA, an MD, and a JD, from places like Brown, Columbia, NYU, and Harvard. How he somehow fit thirty years of elite schooling into his life by the age of 37 is a mystery to me. (Incidentally, yesterday was his birthday. Happy birthday, Jacob!)

Sidebar: I actually don't know Jacob in real life, so I suppose my wishing him a happy birthday is somewhat creepy. Hopefully he won't be freaked out when I friend him on Facebook.

The point of this story, though: Jacob has published short stories in some of the most prestigious literary journals and magazines in the country, but he also garnered over eleven thousand rejections in the process. How many have you acquired, gentle reader? One? Ten? A hundred? If so, keep at it, because until you top Jacob's high score, I don't want to hear about you quitting the writing racket. When you're a fancy published author one, two, five, or fifteen years down the line, you can use collages of your rejection slips as the endpapers of your book, or at the very least give it a delightfully snarky title. No self-publishing, though; we all know how I feel about that.

If you've got any uplifting stories of literary success despite myriad rejections, feel free to share them in the comments!