How to get rejected

I’ve been slacking on the hard work of gathering rejections lately. Those recent brushes with selling a story kind of threw me off my game. And it didn’t help that two of them had fallen into black holes, so I had to look up how to withdraw them. And write notes of withdrawal. And work up the nerve to withdraw them. And then actually withdraw them. So what happened?

One of the withdrawn stories got formally rejected. Cool! That wasn’t so bad after all.
With all my stories sitting around gathering e-dust, just before NERAX North, I got into put-up-or-shut-up mode, and submitted them. All of them.
The very next day, one of them got another rejection. Good little story! We’re on a rejection roll, now. Get out there and go find another one.