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.
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