I can not say how many hours I have invested in this short piece but it seems that now it is destined for the archived folded on my hard drive. Perhaps it's just not good enough to be worth much of anything other than an exercise in writing.
All I can do is move forward, resolve to write better and keep submitting.Of course this rejection came at a crucial time in my current manuscript. I spent the majority of my writing time this week rearranging scenes and smoothing out the transitions so they make sense. I was nearly frozen at the beginning of the week not knowing how to move forward. There was something wrong with the last few scenes I wrote and my temporary solution was to avoid it because it was difficult.
I finally sat down Tuesday evening and hacked away. Coming up for air on the other side of what was a very tedious and nail biting process, I saw that I did what I had to do in order to keep the story in line and moving forward. I am happy with it now and hoping I can make quick work of the last third of the novel.
Don't archive your story, find another romance press and send it out again. If it gets returned a further ten times, then make it available as a free read. Many online publishers offer free reads as a way of drawing the punters in. They sometimes even ask for short pieces to put together in a free anthology - all in the hope of attracting people who will then browse the books on offer and pay for them. I've just done this with a piece I originally posted on Literotica. I then extended and revised the story to give it a completely different ending and put it away for a couple of years because I didn't like it nor did I have any sympathy for the characters. My publisher asked for a story up to 7,000 words in January to put in a free read anthology to be published towards the end of the year
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