Rejection is never nice …
But sometimes it’s more fun than you’d imagine. The fine but rather strange guys over at Twisted Publishing sent me a rejection email yesterday and I enjoyed it so much that I asked if I could share it.
Kay,
Thank you for sending your story our way. Okay, so, this is the e-mail that it sucks to write. The first batch of notes was easy; we’d just say “No contract for you, LOSER! Looooooooooser! Loo-hoo-hoo-hooser! What’s the matter, gonna cry? Gonna cry, baby? Ha ha, we’re just kidding. Here, have a contract….PSYCHE!!! Loser loser loser! Gonna cry?”
Anyway, we narrowed it down to a lot more stories than we could ever fit in the book without reviewers bellyaching about it being too long. We adored those stories. We made inappropriate advances toward some of them. One of them is slapping us with a lawsuit. But in the end, we knew we couldn’t commit to all of them, and at some point the fling would have to end.
So, as much as we loved your story, we won’t be able to use it for UNTIL SOMEBODY LOSES AN EYE. A lot of tough decisions went into compiling the final list. It wasn’t a case of simply picking our favorite stories; instead, we had to look at how the stories worked together as a whole unit and pretend that we had some glimmer of a vague clue about what the hell we were doing.
Thank you for sharing your sick mind with us, and we hope you find another, better home for your story in two shakes of a flea’s tail.
Jeff Strand
John McIlveen
(note: it’s all John’s fault)
Twisted Publishing
http://www.twistedpublishing.biz
1 Comment
B.A. Goodjohn
16th August 2006Isn’t it great when editors put as much effort into rejecting as you do into writing? I know time is against many editors but when rejections like this arrive, my already high estimation of editors climbs up a ledge.
So where to now?