July 2008 Archives

Got a form rejection in the mail from Asimov's today.  It's a nice enough form.  I also did not win the Chi Short Story Contest.  I haven't received notification yet, but the winners are posted on their site, and since I'm not on that list, that leaves me as a loser.  I also got a nice personal rejection from Neo-opsis Science Fiction Magazine. 

Got yet another rejection for "Tiffany and the Unicorns."  I'm running out of places to send it.  

Got a rejection for my 200 word piece, "The Ghost Under the Ice."  The rejection was also quite short. 

"Alas, this is not what I seek."

That's it.  Seriously. 

Sent "Fox-Woman" off to Fantasy magazine.  

For some reason, the form rejection I got from Cricket for "Seasons of Friendship" just makes me happy.  I think it's them thanking me for sending them my manuscript(s).  And that they looked it over carefully.  And that they mailed it back even though it says it's disposable.  Yeah.  They looked it over REEEEEALLLY carefully.  ^_^ 

Why does it make me happy that I feel like they didn't even bother reading it?  I have no idea.  It doesn't make sense.  Whatever.  Maybe I'm still protected from feeling disappointment from the insane number of cookies I ate yesterday.  Maybe it's because it's the complete opposite of yesterday's rejection, while still being a form. 

Who knows!  Now I have two stories that I have to send out.  I need to get on that. 

I am no longer sad.  I ate an entire box of Samoas (seriously, the whole damn box, I'm a pig) and drank some peppermint tea and watched A Walk to Remember and cried.  Sad movies rock.  Also, I am not dying of cancer.  

Just got my form rejection from Realms of Fantasy. 

I haven't been this disappointed about anything in a long time.  That's what I get for getting my hopes up.  Damn, that sounds really bitter and horrible.  I don't feel bitter and horrible.  I just feel...sad.  Really, really sad. 

My stimulus check came in the mail yesterday.  I'm putting it in the bank tomorrow.  Since I first heard about these checks, I've been thinking about what to do with my free money.  Mostly, my answer is split between my saving account and bills, but I do want to use at least a little of the money to actually stimulate the economy. 

So, I'm stimulating the part I care about most.  I already paid for my Realms of Fantasy subscription.  I just got myself a subscription to Shimmer and I'm donating $5 to each Podcastle, Pseudopod, and Escape Pod. I know that's not much, but I'm struggling to keep my ends meeting, and at least it's something.  And Alasdair Stuart tells me that every cent is appreciated every single time I listen to Pseudopod, so I'm going to feel good about it. 

Douglas Cohen got back to me, and I have to say I'm impressed by how quickly he did.  I'm really glad I already got a subscription to the magazine, because the more I interact with them the more I like them.  He told me that RoF has a pretty full inventory and are taking their time before they commit to buying anything new.  You know what that means?  That means that Shawna McCarthy read my story and liked it enough to keep thinking about it. 

I am having a good day. 

Douglas Cohen responded to my query approximately 30 seconds after I sent it to let me know he'd look into it.  How awesome is that.

AND EVEN MORE AWESOME---also in my inbox was a response from AlienSkin Magazine.  My ACCEPTANCE.   They're going to print "Crossing" in their August/September issue and pay me $5 for it.  WOOT. 

Today is a good day for my writing.  ^_^

Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine is passing "Rapunzel Station" on to second round readers!  Yay! 

Also got a personal rejection from Kaleidotrope for "The Journal of an Artist."

Still nothing from RoF.  Today is the deadline I set for myself to send a query, because today marks half again their listed max response time.  O_o  So, I'm going to send one. 

I edited my story "Prohibited Comfort," which is the one the WorD group work shopped last night.  Wrote a new flash piece at work, too. 

Tonight we work shopped a novel opening and my new flash piece.  Overall, the response to my piece was positive, which makes me feel pretty good about myself.  But now I have to edit it and the suggestions I got were all over the place.  O_o 

One of my fellow group members rungs his own website and makes money with it.  He suggested that I write 200+ more flash pieces and then put them up on the internet every weekday for a year for people with desk jobs to read while they're trapped at work. 

I am terrified and intrigued by this idea.  I have a feeling that he's much more computer savvy than I am, but I do have friends who could help me set up a website in the way he suggested, and I also have the capacity to learn new things.  And I write a lot.  Maybe I could do 260 flash pieces.  That's not too many words, really, if I keep them to around 150 words.  It'll be a challenge, but I like challenges.  Really the scary thing is coming up with that many ideas. 

The mailbox remains my enemy. 

I sent Lullaby to Loneliness to Neo-Opsis Science Fiction.  They're Canadian. 

Still waiting on RoF.  I get butterflies every single time I open the mailbox.  It's getting old. 

Active Stories

Boy Meets Girl	SF	R-1	A-1
Crossing	H	R-2	A-1
First Time	SF	R-1	A-0
Fox-Woman	F	R-7	A-0
The Ghost Under the Ice	F	R-3	A-1
The Gluttongreedy	F	R-3	A-0
Halloween Party	SF	R-5	A-0
If You Weren't Murdering My Wife	SF	R-4	A-0
Journal of an Artist	SF	R-7	A-0
Larva Mother	SF	R-1	A-0
The Last of Her Kind	SF	R-1	A-0
Lullaby to Loneliness	F	R-10	A-0.5
The Minotaur's Garden	SF	R-1	A-0
The Other Side	SF	R-7	A-0
Protection from the Darkness	SF	R-4	A-0
Rapunzel Station	SF	R-4	A-0
Seasons of Friendship	F	R-4	A-1
Shadow Twin	F	R-4	A-0
Shadow Under the Old Barn	F	R-3	A-0
Sleeping Beauty	F	R-10	A-0
Snuffles	SF	R-6	A-1
Theater Cat	F	R-4	A-0
Three Grams	SF	R-3	A-0
Tiffany and the Unicorns	F	R-14	A-0
Toast	SF	R-8	A-1

F - fantasy; SF - science fiction; H - horror; R - rejections; A - acceptances

I don't save paper rejection slips, but I do save electronic ones. They take up less space, I guess.

Here's my official vote for worst form rejection received so far.

Thank you for submitting your story to --------------, unfortunately your story was unsuccessful on this occasion. We encourage you to continue submitting stories, don't let this failure discourage you.

It's really the word "failure" that got to me. How did I fail? By writing the story? By sending it to this market? Or are they apologizing for their failure? I don't know, but it pissed me off. I know I shouldn't get mad at rejections, especially form ones, but still. -_-

This next one is pretty standard, but nice.

Thank you for your patience and for giving me the opportunity to read your manuscript. Sorry, but I will have to pass on this one as it's not quite what I'm looking for. I appreciate your interest in ---------- and hope that you will keep me in mind for future submissions.

I like rejections like that. Maybe they mean it, maybe they don't, but at least they're being nice.

Here are some nice personal things.

I have to confess the image of the toasts jumping up and down on the dance pads cracked me up! Unfortunately, I just didn't think there was enough of a story here for this piece to be really successful.

I have to say I don't see nearly enough badger-based fiction. But for me, the scientific unlikeliness, and the unpleasant female protagonist, outweighed its badgerly charms. I hope you're able to find a good home for it soon.

Those are both from the same market. I submit to them a lot. They are pretty amazingly nice. They are also fast, which is awesome.

Here are a couple harsher personal rejection quotes.

We are looking for the new, and aggressive bread products are certainly unusual, but we're afraid toast and muffins just don't make for fascinating monsters. We also felt Elayne seemed almost simple-minded, with an interior life not sufficiently complex to make her an effective narrative voice. The action also felt clumsy in places,

Your brief tale of a giant radioactive mutant badger disturbed in its lair by a UN team tried to be amusing but never really delivered on the humor.

Also from the same place, and actually about the same stories. I didn't plan that, but it's actually pretty cool. I submit to this market because if he can't break me and get me to stop submitting stuff, no one can.

One more, from the same place.

Thanks, but not for us. You're surely aware of the risk in writing in a unicorn story in 2007, as you even write in the story "She felt like a cliché." Sadly, she was a cliché: the cliché of a character waiting in a bar (we get a couple of those each day) and, as a female, contemplating her own appearance so that the reader can know what she looks like (the oldest trick in the book, even if she simply remembers what she looks like in a mirror instead of just looking in a mirror). Really, the first four grafs can be sliced off without any loss to the story at all. Now, I did kind of like the idea of unicorns causing golf course wrecks and cancer and all that -- it was funny and I get the joke -- but there was just too much other stuff and not enough of the paranoia. Also, the bit where the unicorns kill her falls flat. I hope I'd be thinking something more visceral and interesting if unicorns ever stabbed me to death.

I'm not saying that he's not right. He probably is. And maybe it could be useful if it didn't seem so mean and get me instantly on the defensive. I don't know. I don't ever expect this market to print me, I just keep on sending stuff to toughen myself up. Also, to make him read it, because I feel like he hates me and my stuff and I'm petty.

I use Duotope to track my submissions and to find places to submit to.  I like it very much.  So far I have tracked 81 submissions.  Two of them are from before I even joined the site, because I had the information about the submissions in my email.  Of those 81 submissions, I've received 61 rejections and 1 acceptance (In Trail of Indiscretion #8).  To be fair to me, I also took second place in a contest (the PARSEC short story contest), but I couldn't enter that into Duotrope because I wasn't sure about dates and things. 

Anyway, if anyone else that I know has received over 61 rejections in the past year plus a few months, feel free to tell me so. 

I've been waiting to hear back from Realms of Fantasy for 129 days now.  I got an email from their slush reader to tell me he was passing my story up the ladder.  I was very happy.  I'm still happy about it, but I really want to know if they're printing it or not.  I'm tired of waiting.  At the same time I don't want to get an answer because then I won't be able to hope anymore, and I want them to print me sooooooooo bad.  It's such a nice magazine.  I've got a subscription and everything.  Because it's nice. 

I have 19 stories out on the market right now.  One of them is creative nonficiton.  The rest are science fiction, fantasy, or horror, though the horror are really just dark science fiction or fantasy.  I have 6 stories that are finished, but need more work before I can send them out. 

I have stories out at Realms of Fantasy, Ploughshares, Beyond Centauri, Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, From the Asylum, Kaleidotrope, AlienSkin Magazine, Les Bonnes Fees, Aberrant Dreams, Asimov's Science Fiction, Cricket, The Town Drunk, Dreams & Nightmares, Coyote Wild, Escape Pod, Chizine, Horror Garage, and Pseudopod. 

Well, my other blog is about my life in general, and this one is going to be about my writing.  I'm going to track of my writing and my submitting.  And also my getting rejected.  Look forward to highlights from the worst form rejections as well as the best.  I'll share nice personal things people mention as well as harsh stuff.  Generally, I don't think I'm going to mention who said what, just because people don't usually mean for their rejection slips to go up on the internet. 

I write a lot, and I submit a lot.  A lot.  More than anyone else I know, I think.  I know that I have claimed more rejection prizes from my writing group than anyone else. 

My writing group is awesome.  I'm a member of Write or Die.  They keep me motivated to write, they give great advice, and they're all around great people and I enjoy spending time with them.