"Dear Writer: We appreciate the opportunity to read your work, but unfortunately this submission was not a right fit for _____. Thank you for trying us.
Sincerely, The Editors"
A couple of weeks after my first submission I get my first rejection. A nice generic form letter. I like the tone of "It's not you, it's us." Hey, at least it wasn't a personalized letter of the sort Jenny longs to send ("At least your mother would like it").
Last year, Jenny proposed a challenge: get three rejections. We had a year to do it, and those of us who did were promised baked goods. I managed to get two acceptances - Apollo's Lyre and The Hungry Eye so Jenny brought cookies to my housewarming party.
A couple people took issue with the challenge, "Why do you want people to get rejection letters?" However, that was missing the point. The point was to try for publication. Since the odds for most writers are that most of what they submit won't be acccepted, rejections were proof that you had submitted something. Besides, an acceptance counted as two rejections, so acceptances were still valuable.
This year, Jenny issued the same challenge. Now I've got one rejection on my tally sheet and more to come. I'm thinkin' brownies.
Another good thing about being rejected is the ability to submit to http://www.rejectedq.com/. Of course, they want five rejection slips included with your submission, so you best get cracking.
2 comments:
Just remember: It's *not* you...it's all them.
When you're the editor, then you're the genius...but every editor that rejects you is really an idiot who doesn't deserve their job. =)
It's a theory of relativity, right? Everyone is dumb, relative to me.
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