I'm recently taken stock of my non-career (no fiction publishing credits), and it's pretty bleak. I *have been* struggling with several issues - some of them fairly fundamental - but I've also followed a pattern of getting nice rejections before sitting down, working out a long list of reasons why that project will never be published, and working my arse off to write a better book. And, y'know, that's not a bad trait in a writer - but I ended up, among other things, with one project in the drawer that I rewrote four years ago which I never even sent out. Nobody got the chance to reject it, I did it for them, and looking at it from the point of being a better editor than I was then - yes, it has weaknesses and needs revision and I *can* make it better with the skills I've learnt in the meantime, so I won't send it out as is ... but I'm not convinced that it would have _been_ rejected, if you get my meaning. And looking at another piece that was heavily critiqued and had all its problems pointed out, I recently reread it, expecting to cringe at how bad it was... and now, with the distance, I can see what I was doing, and it's pretty darn good writing in a way; just not in the ways that counted with the people who critiqued it. I'm not saying they were wrong - they weren't - but I expected to find something hideous... and it's not. It's flawed, but not 'bad writing'.