I have no problem with rejection. I don't say this philosophically; I say it realistically. It's all part of the process. I'm still at the point where I get more rejections than acceptances, but I understand it's a numbers game. The more you send out, the more likely you are to get an acceptance. The Paris Review isn't going to come hunt you down if you're not out there.
So every Tuesday is "Submission Day" - I crack open my Writer's Market or go to Poets and Writers and find a few places that seem to suit me and I send out. I have it all carefully documented on a spreadsheet and I do what I need to do to put myself out there.
I've gotten plenty of rejection letters. Almost all of them are formula, usually Xeroxed, sometimes, to my amusement, Xeroxed crooked. They're always pretty bland, and always have these words in them, in some fashion: "regret" "keep trying" "luck elsewhere" "thanks for thinking of us." It's fine. I have a folder of them, just for fun.
But today I got this, and it was so comically awful I have to share it:
Thanks for submitting your work to Under the Sun. Without submissions, of course, our journal wouldn't exist. We regret (yes, just like all the other journals) that we can't respond to every submission personally. We small, our work-load is large, and also have day jobs. That's not the way is [sic] should be, but unfortunately that's the way it is -- for us as writers as well as you.
Please do not attach this rejection slip to your wall. You'll eventually tire of that, and then all those rejection slips will be so crispy and crumbly that you won't be able to recycle them. So recycle it now: it's nothing. Give this solitary fragment of paper some purpose beyond making you momentarily unhappy, and save a pathetically tiny particle of tree.
Okay, let's dissect. First of all, they didn't state until the SECOND paragraph that this was rejection letter. Way to miss the point. Secondly, they think I no better artwork available to me that I need to attach their half-sheet letter to my wall? Thirdly, they're implying that I must receive SO MANY rejections that my office will become inundated with them if I don't recycle it, that I will, in effect, get buried by own ineptitude as a writer. Methinks the staff editors at Tennessee Tech University take themselves a touch too seriously.
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3 comments:
This is suspiciously similar to how high schoolers let each other "down easy." I love that they worry you are so broken up, so crestfallen, so in need of consolation that they must prop you up before you fall to pieces(!). Clearly, the editors have waited their whole lives to write such sweet nothings. Oh, sweet little nothing speck of tree!
Either that - or it's the rejection letter they wish they had gotten, and obviously, they all have many similar letters ATTACHED to their walls. Have you ever attached a rejection letter to your wall?
Any way you slice it, that is a fantastic letter. It was so condescending and juvenille, you would have to be completely out of your mind to be upset over that.
You know what my favorite rejection is?
"Get the F*&! out of here!"
I'm a bit of a masochist.
Keep on keepin' on...
Adam
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