I mostly just wanted to laud T’s posting below and say Go! Go! Go!
I also wanted to clarify that my active collecting of rejection slips is due far more to impatience than moxie. Simply put, I do not want years and years to go by before my first novel is published. But I guess the important thing is to be persistent, regardless of where your motivation comes from. However, I find persistence to be very difficult, and the submission/rejection process to be very discouraging, whereas I excel at impatience; so I figured I might as well use the one in service of the other. So my advice for the day is to find what motivates you to keep writing and submitting; even if that’s something as lowly as frustration, or as lofty as hubris, just keep at it!
One more thing. Though I would love to say that I made confetti from my rejection slips, I’m too afraid to destroy them in case I get audited one day and have to prove that I was sincerely trying to pursue a writing career. I’m also not masochistic enough to make wallpaper out of them. Basically they just sit in a file folder, holed away in a drawer and out of my immediate awareness. They also get logged on a spreadsheet with date of receipt, because I’m anal that way.
