Precision, not accuracy

I took statistics in college twice. (Not intentionally, some credits just didn't translate over between getting the Associate in Arts and getting the Associate in Applied Science). I remember the little diagrams both teachers drew to explain the difference between precision and accuracy:

Precision (the bottome one) is hitting the same mark over and over, but the mark can be anywhere. Accuracy is the special kind of precision that involves actually hitting the bullseye.

My writing career has precision but not accuracy.

I'm looking at my latest Quarter-finalist from Writers of the Future (Tale of a Fox, for those familiar with my shorts, i.e. Backspacers). (Hi, Backspacers!) Quarter-Finalist means it falls in the top 10-15% of all their submissions. It also means the slush reader got all of the way through to the end of the story but it didn't make it into the Semi-Finalist or Finalist stacks. It is supposed to be good news, and it was terribly exciting the first time it happened. But this is the fourth or fifth time I've made quarter-finals. There's no way to tell if I'm getting any closer, which is quite frustrating. I'm also grumpy since my husband crashed our computer right after I mailed the submission out, and as much as I was sure I was religiously backing up to my jump drive and to the second computer (which he is forbidden to touch), neither had the most recent version of this story on it, the one with the revisions I did that I'm sure were quite kick-ass but are completely gone from my memory now.