rejection

KIDS, Like any writer worth his salt, I’ve been pondering rejection recently. Which is to say, I’ve been pondering rejection for decades now, ever since Ballantine Books told 10-year old Jeff that his Lord of the Rings homage War of the Gem wasn’t quite what they were looking for despite sporting this kick-ass crayon cover:

I mean, you’d buy this book, wouldn’t you? That cover has it all: A garish yellow base, trees that look like geometric monstrosities, a sense of perspective sourced from Flatland, and two figures who appear to be in Halloween costumes. One appears to be Batman. This is what 10-year old Jeff would have called marketing gold.

So, yeah, rejection. In my ruminations on the subject I sometimes overlook a Very Special Moment for any working writer: The Non-Rejection.

Yes! But also, no!

The Non-Reject is that magical hang-fire moment when an editor responds to your submission with anything other than outright rejection. Sometimes they say your story has been moved on, but there’s no final decision. Sometimes they say that you got very close but ultimately it’s a ‘no.’ Or sometimes they just send a really, really nice rejection that tells you how awesome they think your story is while explaining why they can’t buy it.

It’s better than a flat-out rejection, obviously. Just last week an editor took the time to tell me a story I’d submitted to their magazine was being moved on to the next round of their process, and that was nice. Sure, the story may ultimately be rejected, but it was great to hear anyway.

Non-rejections affirm you, after all. They mean you’re in the room, you’ve been seen, and no one is secretly laughing at you behind your back. At least, not about this particular story.

Of course, non-rejections don’t pay the bills. But then, acceptances don’t pay the bills, do they? Ha ha! Writing is a miserable existence.

You’ve written a novel! Or a short story, or an epic poem, or a confessional memoir that’s 350,000 words about your sexual exploits, drinking binges, crying jags, and occasional abduction by aliens. As one does.

As hard as that might have seemed, many writers find the next step to be much more difficult: Submitting that sucker. Whether it’s to an agent, a publisher, a magazine, or some other market, the moment you decide you’re done with a story and you want to sell it is terrifying, because you’re saying it’s done, you can’t improve it any more, and you’re about to voluntarily invite people to pass judgment on it. It can be paralyzing. Once you start reading the guidelines it gets easier and easier to think your story doesn’t fit, or it’s not good enough, so why bother?

I just sent off three story submissions to magazines, and one is probably a ridiculously inappropriate submissions. Wrong market, and I’m not 100% certain the story is actually any good. I submitted it anyway, because that’s the secret: Don’t read the guidelines. Don’t give the editor an opportunity to talk you out of it. Just send in the sub.

Like a Drunken Sailor

Submitting fiction like a drunken sailor may not make for the most efficient of submission processes. It may not make you any friends among editors, or result in any more sales than a more focused approach. But what skipping the guidelines—and the thought process over the appropriateness and quality of your work—gets you is peace of mind. Sure, you might still get that rejection, but better to be rejected and have had a chance at a sale than to talk yourself out of submitting in the first place.

I’ve certainly had the experience of submitting a story to a market that I think has no chance of selling, and, then selling it. The thing is that editors will always tell you how picky they are—you should only send them your absolute best work and then only when the moon is full and you have recently bathed in the blood of virgin goats, after spending decades in a cave contemplating your story. The more you read the guidelines, the easier it is to be talked out of any shred of confidence you might have in your work.

Just click submit. Your worst case scenario is a quick rejection. If you’re smart, you’ll do what I do and turn rejections into a slow-motion, long-term drinking game.

Once again, I’ve taken a walk through my many, many, many rejections letters in search of interesting or humorous things. This time I switched over to my pile of short story rejections.

I write a fair number of short works out of love, and also because I think writing short stories keeps you in practice. By forcing myself to think up a premise and knock out 1,000 – 5,000 words that conclude with a recognizable ending every month, I’m keeping my skills sharp. Or so I tell myself. Whatever, shut up. Anyways, as a result of this practice I have tons of short stories to sell, and so I, er, sell them. I’ve been trying to hawk my short stories for decades, and I have the rejections to prove it.

These days, most of those rejections are emails, because I don’t submit via paper any more. But back in 2006 I was still sending out paper submissions, with HILARIOUS cover letters. Trust me: Hilarious cover letters for the win. I got this response for a short story called “Time’s Thumb”:

NO PANTS for the win.

I don’t recall what I wrote in the cover letter about my pants, but it amused the editor enough to invite me to submit again. Did I? I honestly can’t recall right now. Probably not, because I am incompetent.

I do think selling writing is 50% finding someone on the other side that sees things the way you do, who gets your jokes and references. Making an editor laugh is a good way to be memorable to them, and to wedge your story into their brains. Also, it’s one more step towards a world where everyone just accepts that I don’t wear pants. Mission: Accomplished.

As I continue to trawl my own storied past of rejection letters for blog fodder, I came across this significant bit of personal history. The year was 2002, the novels was called In Sad Review, which is a terrible, awful title, but it’s the novel that, several re-writes later, finally sold to Tyrus Books as Chum.

Now, those re-writes were done with the occasional advice of my agent, who returned to it every few years with ideas and kept trying to sell it even as other books of mine sold, and even as other clients of hers took off and became Big Deals. And this is all interesting because the rejection I got in 2002 was this one:

So, a rejection, but one that prompted me to send In Sad Review to the person who would become my agent, and a mere ten years later she in fact sold that novel. Just goes to show, even form rejections can sometimes lead you to something good.

Here we are in the second installment of essays about rejection letters I’ve received, because it’s educational and also because this blog is a hungry time-devouring beast that demands content, content, more and more content! until I lay awake at night wondering how in the world I will attract eyeballs tomorrow, and the next day, and the next until sleep is a distant memory.

Also, going back through these rejection letters has been eye-opening. First of all, I don’t recall being this industrious. I’m typically a lazy, lazy man. Secondly, I don’t recall being this hilarious.

Back in the Day I bought a Writer’s Market and read all the advice within and then promptly ignored it all and wrote these sloppy, funny, shaggy-dog type query letters based on the theory that I didn’t want to work with an agent or editor who didn’t “get” me or my sense of humor. This has proven to be excellent advice from my younger self, which is an unusual condition as my younger self’s advice is typically horseshit along the lines of “Sleep more” or “Dude!” – that’s it, just the word dude.

Anyways, here’s a query letter I sent out to a small publisher in early 1997, which was sent back to me with the handwritten notes on it, requesting the manuscript, and then my follow-up letter delivering the manuscript and the handwritten notes rejecting the book. I thought I’d share these because the query letter is a disaster in many ways, and yet it got a request for a full solely because I amused everyone in the room – in fact, I have another rejection somewhere that tells me flat out they would publish the query letter but not the book.

Yet Another Query letter from a Desperate and Violence-Prone Writer of Fiction

My God You Want to See the Book

The book itself was title Shadow Born (yes, yes, I know – my titles are awful and everyone knows this) and is one I still quite like, actually, although it is definitely juvenilia. It’s set at a college party where something terrible happens, is told from various POVs and employs some minor experimental things (experimental for me, not, you know, literature itself). The bit about my brother’s feedback is true. When he read the MS he complained that the final chapter, which was the MC ranting in a stream-of-consciousness way, should be titled “Lord Kincaid’s Farewell Address” because of its pomposity, so I promptly re-titled the chapter “Lord Kincaid’s Farewell Address” in a fit of pique. BURN.

Anyways, I had a lot of success getting responses from agents and editor by sending humorous, self-deprecating queries. I also had a lot of blank, form, and slightly negative responses to this tactic, so Your Mileage May Vary.

SO, every weekend I sit here hungover and desiccated and try to think of something to write about on this blog that will make me feel like a Real Writer, entertain y’all, and possibly win me some sort of obscure blog award (do they still do that?). So I try to think about my few skills, which is always depressing. Aside from the ability to drink heavily (right up until the moment I lose that ability) and a certain skill in manipulating remote controls, I have disturbingly few talents. Oh, sure, the whole writing thing. So let’s amend that sentence to read “disturbingly few remunerative talents.”

And then it hit me: I do have one skill: The ability to collect rejection letters. I sent out my first fiction submission when I was 11 years old, and since then I’ve collected tons. Tons! of rejections.

These days they are largely electronic, of course, but I am so old I actually have a stack of rejection letters that I keep like the proverbial slave whispering in Caesar’s ear during the Triumph. So I thought, let’s examine some of these. It can be fun to humiliate yourself by exploring your failures. We’re starting off with this gem from the late 1980s.

What’s my name, Baen?

SO: Cravenhold was an awful fantasy novel I wrote when I was about 14. It was inspired a bit by The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, and I took from that series the idea of a person from our universe being transported to a fantasy universe where he had immense power but very little understanding of it or how it worked.

It’s not good. Still, because at the age of 14 I hadn’t yet realized that “good” is generally a requirement for manuscripts, I submitted it. Also, I had no idea that different publishing companies had different styles or flavors, and Baen was almost certainly not a good fit for my work.

Now, back in those days submitting a manuscript was a damn job, kids. I had to photocopy 360 pages of typewritten work, smeared with white-out (or, more accurately, pester my father to bring it into work and photocopy it for me) then type out a cover letter where I bragged about being 14, then stuff it with an SASE into a manilla envelope, then take it to the post office.

So, you can imagine my adolescent outrage when they sent back a flimsy form letter without even bothering to make a note of any kind to indicate that my manuscript was not immediately fed into a machine that turns manuscripts into dark black cubes that are then used to build more machines that in turn transform manuscripts into dark black cubes, and so on. Today, of course, I can only imagine the hilarity that ensued when Baen received a novel from a bragging 14-year old that contained as much awful writing and borrowed ideas as Cravenhold, and so I now think I got off easy.

The form letter rejection, of course, lives on, and I’ll admit that even today I am more surprised when places I submit (on my own, typically magazines) don’t use a form rejection, because I totally believe the line about how they have so many stories competing for attention, yada yada. So when I get a “Dear Jeff” and a line about the story itself, I am generally made very happy.

I’ll be posting more exciting moments of Fail from my literary life as we go. Because all y’all seem to really enjoy it when I fail. <bursts into tears>