You have the right attitude. Keep sending out your stuff until there are so many of your works out there that you can't keep track without a spreadsheet. Pin your rejections to the wall or pile them in a stack somewhere, and the bigger the stack gets the more proud you can be, because you are putting yourself out there. You are trying. That's more than most people can say.

I tried my hand at submitting a story many years ago and I am proud of my 5 rejection slips, especially the one where they ticked a box that said something like 'although we are unable to publish your story at this time, we would be very interested to see other stories written by you.' They even underlined the part about being interested!

Sadly, I allowed life to get in the way after that and haven't much managed to write much until recently. Now I'm at least writing regularly and putting my work out there, so it might be time to start thinking about sending something out to actual publishers soon.

Thanks for a motivating article.