No Whining Zone

If you're looking to contain your whiny rejected self, check out these rules.  I like this one in particular: "I'm actually a pretty upbeat person with a slightly inappropriate sense of humor. I have a 24 hour rule about rejection and whining in general." Imagine, only whining for 24 hours! I'm going to give it a whirl.

Why You Never Write Me Back No More?

It's flattering to get speculative credit, but I'm pretty sure this little whiny blog has nothing to do with the new no-response policies of certain literary agents.  They're just tired and worn out.  And as we all know every day, thanks to the Interwebs, modern courtesy is pretty much dead.

Writer, Rejected Receives a Different Kind of Letter

The subject line of the email below was "Do we have a deal," but in all caps. Personally, I suspect loyal LROD commenter, CAPS MAN.  I find the link to be especially disturbing, as part of the ruse?  People are really something, aren't they?

CONFIDENTIALITY NOTICE!!!
DEAR FRIEND
I AM MR.kabiru yanogo
I WORK AS THE AUDITING//ACCOUNTING MANAGER
BANK OF AFRICA (BOA), OUAGADOUGOU,
BURKINA FASO.

I AM MR kabiru yanogo. FROM BURKINA FASO, I KNOW THAT MY MAIL WILL BE AS A SURPRISE TO YOU BUT I WILL WANT YOU TO KNOW THAT THIS BUSINESS DEAL WHICH I HAVE BROUGHT TO YOUR DOOR STEP WILL BE BENEFICIAL TO THE BOTH OF US AND OUR FAMILIE’S.THE AMOUNT OF MONEY INVOLVED IS SEVEN MILLION SEVEN HUNDRED THOUSAND USA DOLLARS ($7.7MILLION US DOLLARS) ,WHICH I WANT TO TRANSFER OUT OF THIS COUNTRY TO ANY BANK ACCOUNT OF YOUR CHOICE IN YOUR OWN COUNTRY, ALL TO OUR OWN FINANCIAL BENEFIT, THIS MONEY WAS OWNED BY ONE OF OUR CUSTOMERS IN(BANK OF AFRICA OUAGADOUGOU BURKINA FASO)WHERE I WORK AS THE ACCOUNTING MANAGER.THE CUSTOMER'S NAME IS CALLED(MR SALAM MUBARAK)FROM IRAQ. HE WAS INTO PROPERTIES AS HIS BUSINESS IN IRAQ AND OTHER PART OF ARAB WORLD AND BUSINESS COMMERCIALIST IN WEST-AFRICAN REGIONS. HE DIED ON THE 17 July 2006, 9:00 AM WHEN HE WENT FOR A HOLIDAY SHOPPING IN THE MARKET SQUARE IN Al-Jazaer, Mahmudiya, IN OTHER FOR YOU TO BELIEVE ME HONESTLY GO THROUGH THIS (website) BEFORE YOU START WITH ME.

AND SINCE THEN, NO CLAIM HAS BEEN PLACED IN HIS BANK ACCOUNT BALANCE WHICH WORTH UPTO ($7.7MILLION US DOLLARS).WITH DUE RESPECT I WILL LIKE TO TRANSFER THIS MONEY OUT OF THIS COUNTRY BUT SUCH FUND CAN NOT BE TRANSFERRED WITHOUT A FORIGN ACCOUNT ATTACHED TO IT . THAT IS WHERE I NEED YOUR HELP IN PROVIDING A FORIGN BANK ACCOUNT OR INFORMATION FOR THIS TRANSFER AND YOU WILL NOT REGRET HELPING ME I PROMISE , THIS FUND CAN BE TRANSFERRED IN THIS WAYS,YOU SHALL PRESENT YOURSELF AS A BUSINESS ASSOCIATES TO MR.SALAM MUBARAK WHEN HE WAS ALIVE OR AS A CARE-TAKER IN CHARGE OF ALL THE PROPERTIES OF MR SALAM MUBARAK IN AFRICA I SHALL MAKE AVAILABLE TO YOU DOCUMENT’S AND INFORMATIONS WITH WHICH A SUCCESSFUL TRANSFER SHALL BE PLACED ON THE FUND. l SHALL BE YOUR GUIDIANCE AND INSTRUCTOR THROUGHOUT THE DURATION OF THIS TRANSACTIONSO AS TO ENSURE A SWIFT AND SURE TRANSFER OF THE FUND TO YOUR BANK ACCOUNT.

AS TO YOUR BENEFITS, YOU SHALL BE ENTITLED TO 40% OF THIS FUND FOR YOUR ACEPTANCE AND MAKING AVALABLE A FORIGN BANK ACCOUNT IN THIS VERY TRANSFER , WHILE 5% WILL BE SET ASIDE FOR ALL THE EXPENCES BOTH OF US MIGHT INCURE DURING THE COURSE OF THIS TRANSACTION . WHY THE REMAINING 55% WILL BE FOR ALL MY EFFORT IN ARANGING THIS FURTUNE FROM DAY ONE TO THIS VERY FINAL STAGE , IN YOUR REPLY I WANT YOU TO INCLUDE THE FOLLOWING DIRECT MOBILE NUMBER FOR EASY COMMINICATION PRIVATE EMAIL ADDRESS IF ANY, URGENCY HAS TO BE IMPLIED FOR IT’S AN EFFORT I HAVE BULT WITH YEAR’S AND MONEY , THERE IS PRACTICALY NO RISK INVOLVED,THIS TRANSACTION WILL BE EXECUTED UNDER A LAGITIMATE ARRANGEMENT THAT WILL PROTECT YOU FROM ANY BREAGE OF LAW, I WANT YOU TO TELL ME IF YOU ARE CAPABLE OF HANDLING THIS TRANSACTION OR NOT .REPLY IMMIDIATLY SO THAT I CAN SEND TO YOU FURTHER DETAIL’S OF THIS TRANSACTION.

YOUR'S
MR.kabiru yanogo
THE AUDITING//ACCOUNTING MANAGER.

A New Application for Twitter

In case you don't want to write a book on twitter, now you can come up with pithy one-sentence twitter burped about somebody else's novel and sum up some author's long, hard, life-long struggle to create art (thanks to Picador's new twitter book club).  

Awesome.

Yo Mama Mama!

You have to read down to the very last line to get the horror of this particular call for submissions:

Hip Mama Fiction Contest

It's time to make something up! ~~~
For all of you beautiful liars out there- Hip Mama is gonna be breaking some fresh ground and doing a Short Story Contest judged by Kerlin Richter and Ariel Gore.

First Prize is $100, your Short Story as the feature in issue 44, the Creativity issue, along with a profile and picture of your brilliant self, AND a Lifetime Subscription to Hip Mama (we don't even sell lifetime subscriptions anymore).

Ten runners up will get a four issue subscription, their names and story titles in the zine and their full stories will be published online.

** what about?**
Write any short story you want. Just make sure there is a Mama in there somewhere. It can be any genre, any style, from any ol' point of view. The only rule for content is: There must be a Mama in the story.

** how long?**
Keep it under 2500 words.

** where to?**
The best way is to attach your story as a word document and e-mail it to
(replace (at) with @). In the subject line write 'Short Story Submission' and your name. Or
Mail it old school to P.O Box xxxxx, Portland OR 97212.

** how much?**
$25 per story entry fee, or splurge and for $60 and I will mail back your story with comments.

Say, what, Mama?  Six-Oh-Clams for what? Your back wash on my fiction so you can line your pockets?  If you treated the dear woman who gave birth to me that way, I'd seriously have to slap you. Not cool, hipster.  Not cool.

(Thanks to the anonymous reader who sent this in.)

What's a Bumper Crop Anyway?

A proliferation of literary rejection pride?  Sara Crowley (who is 252 years old, according to her bio) over at A Salted blog has posted some of hers (lit mag and editor names deleted). So, maybe it's time we come out of the closet as rejects?  Anyway, here's my favorite of hers:

"Thanks for sending us “Title of Story.” We’re sorry to say they didn’t quite find a home in Name of Lit Mag. We had a bumper crop of submissions and had to make a lot of hard decisions fast, and live with them, unfortunately. It was a close run thing. We always like pieces that are a little off the main road like this, so we do hope you’ll send us something for the next issue. We think you were unlucky this time around."

Love the mixed metaphors in this rejection, don't you?

GAK Winner--Jacob Appel on Abortion

I love it when a reader writes in with an update on our most recent GAK! Winner.  Where in the world is Jacob Appel?  Apprently everywhere:

A hero on trial

Re “Abortion doctor’s trial to start,” March 15

The Times' article on the upcoming trial of Kansas abortion provider George Tiller certainly conveyed the animosity that abortion opponents feel toward his work, but I am not sure it captured fully the degree to which abortion-rights supporters, such as myself, hold him in esteem. To many progressive Americans, George Tiller is a genuine hero who ranks alongside Susan B. Anthony and Martin Luther King Jr. in the pantheon of defenders of human liberty.  Although one need not agree with this assessment of Tiller, the intensity of this brave man's support among his admirers should not be underestimated.

Jacob M. Appel
New York
The author teaches bioethics at New York University.

Ira Rosofsky's Debut

I am the author of Nasty, Brutish, and Long: Adventures in Old Age and the World of Eldercare (Avery/Penguin, March 19, 2009). After Writer Rejected picked up on my story in my Psychology Today blog--I shamelessly linked to this blog and let WR know it--I was asked to do a Q & A about my journey to publication. One of the comments here said, “The last thing I would do is ever make it public that I read this blog, let alone comment.” Hey, if you get published, you enter the promotional phase where all you care about is that they spell your name right, link to your web page, and let folks know how to buy your book. Who am I to turn up my nose at a popular blog like this? I am ever amazed at how many writers there are out there. The agent, Nathan Branford--on his blog--had a first-paragraph contest. The winner got a full read from him. In a day or two, he had 2,000 entries. Recently I had a full-page write-up in Writers Digest, but my agent emailed me: “Hard to know if it will sell books, since writers are so jealous.” I know I am.

When did you start writing the book?
As a nonfiction writer, this is sort of a trick question. I didn’t start writing the book until April Fool’s Day 2007. That’s when the one-year contract clock began. I sold the book on proposal. My proposal was 25,000 words long--most of it a sample chapter along with detailed outlines of the other chapters. The contract specified that I had to deliver a 75,000 word manuscript--so I’m thinking, “Hey, I only have to add two words to each word in the proposal and there’s a book.” But it wasn’t that simple. I wrote the proposal in early 2005. So here it is only four years later and my book hits the street on March 19, 2009. A multitude of people have started and graduated from college in the four years from idea to a bookstore near you--only twice the gestation period of an elephant. I hope it’s not a white one.

What prompted your interest in it?
The oldest and most platitudinous rule about writing is to “write what you know.” And I know nursing homes. At first I wanted to write a book about my medical history with a rare tumor, but disease memoirs are a dime a dozen. I thought a book about eldercare had a unique quality to it. I’m a psychologist, but one with the garden-variety fantasy of being a writer, so I tell people not to think of me as a psychologist writing about his professional area of expertise, but as a writer who happened to have an interesting job to write about.

How would you describe your writing process?
Despite being a debut author, I had great confidence in my writing chops. (If we can’t indulge in a bit of grandiosity, what’s the point?) But I had never written a book. So despite my editor saying, “Some people with contracts simply say, ‘I’ll get back to you in a year’, I took him up on his offer to work closely with me. I’d send him a chapter, and we chatted about it via phone and emails. Each chapter took about six weeks--times seven equals forty-two weeks--a couple of months short of a year. When I threw in a vacation during which I tried, but did no writing, and general goof-off time, I was able to have it all done with about three or four weeks to spare. Then he did a line edit, and we worked on that. The contract said 75,000 words, but I handed in more than 80,000. You always want something for your editor to do. He chopped off huge chunks, and the final product is around 65,000 words. My editor said he was eliminating material that impeded the narrative flow. “It will make the book more commercially viable.” Artist that I am “commercial viability,” which sounded in my head like cash register ringing was music to my ears. Besides much of the work on the cutting room floor may find its way into future work. Writing the book was one of the pleasantest years of my life. I found it to be simplicity itself to wake up each morning and know that all I had to do that day--when I wasn’t on my reduced schedule day job as a psychologist--was to put fingers to keyboard. It helped to have deadline pressure. I’ll confess I could be more of a self-starter, which may be why I didn’t write a book until someone gave me a contract--and the deadlines--to write one. Now, in the midst of promotion, which sucks, but you have to do it, I feel great nostalgia for the writing part. Writing is introspection and observation. Promotion is extroversion and performance. The two sides of me--and I suspect other writers--don’t always play well together.

Who read your drafts?
Until quite recently, only two other people had read my book--my editor and my agent. I told my wife what was in it--particularly the parts about her--but she didn’t read it until only a couple of months ago. Same for my brother who has a featured role. There were no beta readers, no critique partners. I relied on the judgment of the professionals I had the good fortune to be working with.

How did you decide which comments were important and which you didn't need to heed?
I trusted in the advice of professionals. There were a couple of situations where I dug in and insisted on the inclusion of some material that I believed was among my finest writing. As writers we can fall in love with stuff that may not work in the context of a larger work, but sometimes you have to fight for it regardless.

What was your overall rejection experience with this book?
Prior to this book, I already had spent a year of my time working on a dead-end project. It was a proposal for a science book, specifically a book about psychology for the juvenile market. I had very little interest from agents. One very much liked the material I sent him, but having a PhD was not enough of a platform for him. He wanted me to be a celebrity--stuff like being not just a speaker but the keynote speaker at major psychology conventions, many TV appearances, being quoted by others, and op-eds in national newspapers. So I took his advice and published a series of articles in children’s magazines. I approached him again and he told me that was a start but he still wanted me on Oprah, or the like, before he would consider representation. I was already turning the page and moving on my current book, so I was able to laugh that off--thinking that if I had the credentials he was demanding, why would I need him, or anyone else, as an agent? It made me realize agents can be lazy, looking for writers with platforms sufficiently impressive so that books can sell themselves with little work for them. For Nasty, Brutish, and Long, I first worked up a brief sample and still somewhat naïve about the whole thing, I shot an email to an agent--and I don’t know why I picked her--who immediately responded it was a great concept, but said the writing would be key. This is before I had a proposal. I polished the writing for a few days and sent it to her and she thought it was terrific, and encouraged me to work on a proposal. I’m thinking this is easy, that is, until out of the blue she sent me a Dear John email saying she had “decided not to take on anymore clients.” Disappointed but undaunted, I pressed on thinking that if the one and only agent I had submitted to liked it, everyone else would. Fat chance. My queries received a fair amount of interest but I would get comments like “too depressing” or “this is good but I can’t think of any major house that would buy this.” After about eighty submissions, I found the one, an agent who looks for books that lift the veil on unknown but interesting aspects of our culture--in my case, eldercare. Looking back, despite the eighty rejections--it’s amazing how fast you can send out eighty queries--it took only five months to get representation. After my agent and I whipped my proposal into--those magic words again--“commercial viability”--we were ready to submit to publishers. For about a year, I thought that landing an agent was merely a ticket to a higher level of rejection. As the rejections piled up--close to twenty--I hung my hopes on the fact that few of the rejections were due to lack of literary merit. It was more like, "Best title ever, but too depressing. People just don't want to hear about the walker before it's time." Or, "The material depressed me horribly and I couldn't see readers (or my sales force more importantly) rallying to this." A year later--when I was about to give up and was thinking about literary Plan B or C--my agent happened to have lunch with a newly promoted editor who was looking to build his list. This editor saw past the depression and got the jokes, and a deal was at hand. I had a year to write the book, and yet another year after I finished, the book will be coming to a bookstore near you. And the rejection train never ends. As part of the promotional effort, I get to be rejected by op-ed pages, magazines, TV and radio shows, reviewers, and, most important, but I hope not, buyers and readers of books. As my wife says, “I don’t care if they read it as long as they buy it.”

Where were you when you found out the book had been bought?
I live in New Haven, and was sitting with my dog in the Yale Divinity School Dog Park. I like to chat up the Yale coeds, although in my mind when I think I’m flirting, I’m sure they’re thinking, “Gramps.” One of the things I like about living in a prestigious academic community--with which I have no affiliation--is that almost everyone has written a book. Howard Bloom lives a couple of blocks in one direction and last year’s Pulitzer Prize winner for biography a couple of blocks in the other direction. Despite such luminaries, a friend of mine said that compared to all the dissertations turned into university press books, people will actually want to read my book. So I’m throwing a ball to my dog--two weeks since my agent had had his fateful lunch. I’m on pins and needles. I knew there was interest. I had talked to the editor and he sounded positive, but I’m prepared for the worst. I try to be a pessimist because optimists are always disappointed while pessimists are sometimes pleasantly surprised. My cell phone rings. It’s my agent. The answer is yes, and they’re going to pay me not enough to totally change my life but enough to spend on some nice things. I did the happy dance with my dog, but all he cared about was when I was going to throw the ball again. Dogs and families keep you grounded. My kids are totally unimpressed--which is the way I’d want it to be. I’d prefer they judge me on the type of father that I am, although my younger son helpfully informed me that I’ll only have to earn $600,000 to send the three of them to college.

Who was the first person you told?
After I told my clueless dog, I called my wife.

What words of advice would you give to a writer, rejected on the journey toward getting published?
My agent maintains that despite appearances no worthy book goes unpublished. You have to totally believe in your work, but your belief has to be a valid one. We have to be sharks. Keep swimming or die. Actually, writers don’t have it bad as actors. We have to spend months or years before we can experience rejections. For actors, auditions and rejection can happen every day. But I’m already worrying about whether they’ll buy Book Two. It never ends.

Web: www.rosofsky.com
News and Events: http://nastybrutishandlong.blogspot.com/

Doesn't Need to MEAN Anything

"E-book Pioneer," James Bridle collected two years worth of his Twitter posts and published a "sleek" hardcover on-demand at LuLu. The book is called My Life in Tweets. Says he: "I wanted to ... see if you could make a traditional diary/journal in retrospect. And you can, and it's quite nice. No, most of it doesn't mean anything, certainly not to anyone else, but it makes physical a very real time and effort ... " (Courtesy GalleyCat)

Somebody please throw me under a train if my life's meaning is ever so whittled down.

Halvsies Online in China

A booming literary market yielding about $15 million a year (half going to the writer) can be found online in China according to GalleyCat, there's a digital book website called Shanda, which has 25 million literary readers.   Can you imagine 25 million literary anything in the U.S.?  That's how many people watched American Idol last night.  Face it: we're a culture of junk and celebrity.

Special Consideration, But Nothing Found

Also from poet Debbie Yee's website is this beauty.  It says: "Sorry we didn't find anything here, but your work did receive additional consideration." I hope she didn't try them again. It's unclear, but I believe this one is also from The Normal School.  Maybe Debbie will come around and clarify.  Maybe her submission envelope was mysteriously empty and that's why the editors didn't find anything.  What else, one wonders, could explain such a freakish response?

Hiccups Are Normal But Weird

A lit mag called The Normal School,  hands out the above rejection.  Tag line: "Trust us. We're normal."  They even have a blog.  (What the eff is all that stuff about hiccups?  I don't get it.) Debbie Yee even got a rejection sticker from TNS.

Flannery O'scura

As you know, I ♥ Flannery O since long before R. Ahern compared my stories to hers, and I ♥ a good Flannery O-quote, but I'm not sure I know what she means by this: "Where you came from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it."  Any thoughts?

Katherine Anne Porter is Not My Friend

Despite my better judgment, here's another one I seem to enter every year and never win.  At least they chose winners and a whole bushel of semi-finalists.  Good for everyone involved! (Except for me of course.) 

No Prize This Year--You Suck Too Much

Why do I try?  I don't know.  I guess where there's life, there's hope.  In this case, the editors at Graywolf decided that everyone who submitted a book of nonfiction was deemed sucky by the judge.  Myself included. No $12,000.00. No book contract.  That's always depressing.

Ridiculously Meaty Book Deal

Seriously...a bacon-wrapped, bacon-stuffed log of sausage turns into a six-figure book deal. One word for you: why? Maybe it's because I'm a vegetarian, but this makes me want to barf?

50% Off Back Issues

Here's a fun one from the mailbag.  

"...They had my story less than 3 days before rejecting it. Does that make me believe they gave it "careful consideration"? Well, you know the answer. I guess I actually may have gotten more "careful consideration" than most. There are many writers on Duotrope who report getting 0-day responses from this market. Does Professor Mirsky have the entire student body reading these manuscripts? Is there a submission-reading sweatshop located in some dark basement of the English Department of City College?"

----- Original Message ----- From: "Fiction"------------

To: writer_rejected@unpubbed.com 
Sent: March 02, 2009 4:19 PM
Subject: Your submission to Fiction

Dear Contributor:  Thank you very much for submitting your work. After careful consideration, the editors were not able to accept it for publication.

We would like to offer personalized letters or feedback but limitations of time and staff have made that impossible at the present. We wish you the best of luck in finding a journal to publish your writing. The editorial staff, including the editor-in- chief, Mark Jay Mirsky, welcomes critical response to past issues of the magazine if you wish to include any in future submissions or letters. If you identify yourself as a writer who submitted to Fiction, you may order back issues at a fifty percent discount.

With best regards,
The Editors

Nathan Bransford and the Burning Bush

Just what you needed on a Monday: "10 Commandments for the Happy Writer." By a blogging Literary Agent (blagent). Who does this good looking, successful, optimistic guy think he is? A young Moses? If so, that makes us an unruly nation of slaves set free from Egypt by God who sent down all those plagues. Ten of them, including lice, swarming frogs, and boils. Which is really kind of awesome.

So Very Close

I'm seriously finishing my novel, people.  I'm close. This is my last time through; this is my 12th year of living with these characters.  (You have to live with them for a long time and follow them around to see what they're going to do.  You have to love them more than yourself.) This version is good; it kind of scares me.  Anyway, it's off to the mainstream editor (who loved the first 100 pages and emailed recently with a check-in to reconfirm her interest). I'd say within 3 weeks.  Maybe I'll try it sans agent this time, which is how I sold my first book.  Editor first. Agent second.  Maybe that will be my own personal good luck formula.

Twitter me Zeitgeist

I am always suspicious of people who use the word "zeitgeist" in daily parlance. So...um...yuck. (Or am I being totally jaded?)  Such a different tone from our friend's interview in yesterday's post.  Sadly it is the editors who are the buyers, and the agents, the sellers, which means the editors set the tone for today's books.  If you can't stomach the read.  Here's the upshot: "This fall [HarperCollins Publishers] will publish 21 new hardcover and paperback original titles under the It Books imprint, focusing on pop culture, sports, style and content derived from the Internet, like a planned collection of Twitter posts called Twitter Wit."  Oy.

Be My Agent, Baby!

There are new great agents, and they are sweet-faced and young! See the New York Observer here plus a highlight: Sitting before his impeccably neat desk recently, a framed Bonnie “Prince” Billy print on the wall and a facsimile of the first edition of Ulysses on his bookshelf, the rookie of the year [agent Chris Parris-Lamb] talked about what it means to be selling adventurous writing in today’s environment.   “[Editors] want me to bring them books that are going to secure them their place at their company, and I don’t blame them,” he said. “It’s hard for people to take chances right now. Perversely—ironically, maybe, is the better term—a lot of publishers would rather spend a lot of money on a book, because they’d rather have a smaller list that they invest a lot in than nurture writers.… I understand that. But, I don’t know, man, that’s a really myopic way to do business. Cormac didn’t write Blood Meridian for 20 years. Random House stuck with him through all those books that never sold more than 5,000 copies.”

Non-Branded Rejection

Maybe we should all just start using this generic rejection slip. DIRECTIONS: Send to self on a monthly basis; take with lots of water and lie down for about a week.  The generic version is so much cheaper, and really it's all the same formulation.  WARNING: generic rejection may cause depression, despair, general malaise, suicidal tendencies, and bad breath.  Consult a literary agent before taking.

The Wikis Are Out To Get Me

Remember back when there was a wikipedia entry for LROD and then it got taken down?  Well, now there's a new entry which maybe is permanent, but who knows?  Check it out now because Wiki Reviewers are requesting a speedy deletion!  They say that anonymous bloggers are not notable...can you imagine?

Treisman Reports A Well-Spring of Stories

Maybe fiction isn't really dead.  Or maybe Deborah Treisman is just yanking your chain.  But, either way, here's a quotation, according to the Cat: "Maybe because writers have been struggling or maybe because writers have more time, I've had more stories coming in now than I've seen in the last three or four years."  Go figure.