I've had 300 short stories & poems rejected ... but 100 accepted. "Cemetery Dance" magazine called a book of my short stories as being too much like "O. Henry and Hitchcock." They meant it as an insult but I took it as a compliment. Somebody reviewing a crime story I wrote called it "a new black comedy classic ending with a Shakespearean body count." Works for me. The poem "The Hangman" and the story "The Tell-Tale Heart" made me love reading. James Joyce and Faulkner made me want to write.