Lately I’ve been pretty fortunate. I’ve had lots of work accepted by various journals and venues, and it’s caused me to think about how the cycles of rejections and acceptances are much like the growth and disappearance of our moon.

Rejections are like the waning: They incrementally diminish the brightness of literary optimism. Each “no” is a small fraction of blackness eating away at the visibility of our hope.

But acceptances are nothing like the moon’s waxing (for me, anyway). Instead of a gradual accretion of luminosity, an acceptance is like the whole moon suddenly lit up, brighter and bigger than science could reasonably explain. Whatever darkness may have accumulated is swept away with a single “We would like to publish…”

Ancient adages tell us that planting on a growing moon gives us a better harvest. The Old Farmer’s Almanac tracks moon cycles for just such purposes. My grandparents believed that getting your haircut during a waxing moon meant that the hair would grow back faster. Better wait until the waning to get a trim.

Maybe these pieces of lore have relevance for writers, too: How many Adrienne Rich poems mention the moon, for example? How much more inspired are we by the bright glowing orb in the sky than by the fading slender smile of its counterpart? Perhaps this line of thought is stretching logic a bit, but let’s be honest: The earth’s gravitational pull, the tides, and the other forces of nature around us bear more influence on our artistic motivation than we care to admit.

And when that motivation, that muse, whispers words to us that we lovingly bring to the page, we hope that soon, our lunacy will be rewarded. A bright yellow moon will hang in the sky of our minds, lit fully and immediately by a single glorious word: Yes.