Send out your stories again. And again. And again. Keep believing in yourself no matter what. A little tale of perseverence rewarded. Over forty years ago I wrote an essay on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight for Charles Muscatine's class at Cal. He gave me a B+. I argued with him. It was good, I said. Original. Deserved better.He was unmoved. I re-wrote it and sent it out to scholarly journals. Medievalists shocked and probably disgusted by my psychoanalytic view declared it was not their "cup of tea." Twenty years later someone doing an Anthology in Spain took a revised version and printed it in Spanish. I was pleased except none of my friends could read it and scholars probably didn't notice. I didn't forget about it. Forty years later, finding no takers, I decided to use some of my insights in a novel about Sir Gawain, The Beheading Game. The editor of The New American Library happened to read the novel and out of the blue asked me to write an introduction to their new edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. She thought a psychoanalytic interpretation would liven things up for the students. She said I could spend a paragraph describing my novel's take on age old themes. I even got the evil pleasures of revenge on all the Medievalists who brushed me off. If they use this inexpensive edition for their classes, they will have to read it. I can picture them spluttering.