Throwback to #Rejection Days: This Lady Thinks I'm Working Out My Issues, Not Writing a Proper Memoir (Pfft...lady....Pfft)

I don't like the ligatures...see the "ing" and the "and"? They look weird. I need to fix that, but I think it could be okay.


Anyhoodle....just for old time's sake, in case you think getting published once, twice, or thrice changes things for Writer Rejected and all you writing mice out there, it doesn't.  Here are some rejections I got for my book about disinheritance that no one wanted.

This lady was like: The author is working out her mental issues, not crafting a memoir. And this was from a WOMEN'S imprint. Pfft...mean.

(Now rejections come by text from Secret Agent Man)

Funny: I thought it was the most commercial thing that ever happened to me. Ha!

Does This Author Have Low Self Esteem, Or What?

Someone posted their lit rejection thusly online. But I do believe the big red "You're Rubbish" notation was from the author (being mean to herself), not the rejecting editor.  But that's just a guess. I suppose it is slighlty possible that editors are more aggressive than ever.  Certainly, that would be rather refreshing.

You Are TOO Dumb to Work Here

Is this the nightmare-iest HR executive return application letter ever? Can you imagine applying for a job at Trader Joe's and getting this horror show back as your rejection letter?  I mean, maybe the poor, young applicant seriously dodged a bullet by missing this hiring opportunity by this sadistic individual. I mean, a lesson to young person is one thing, a humiliation is quite another.  Am I wrong? 

Why So Angry?

Anonymous posted this message to me today to let me know if I lose it's because I am a self-promoting douche and if I win I am a sell out. Can't win on those terms. Anyway, made me laugh. Thought I'd share:

"I for one will be delighted when you are finally, definitively rejected, your constant self-aggrandising bleating about having written a book coupled with your fawning to the vanity of editorial market-led pap-loving venality has been nauseating, and should you compromise sufficiently to get your book validated by mainstream publication it will merely go to show how sheer lack of integrity and a will to conform can get you fifteen minute in the overcrowded, overrated, dying-on-its-feet literary spotlight. And yes, I've nothing better to do. Having said that, good luck with your future literary endeavours."

Micro-rejections

Every year in December the peer-review journal Environmental Microbiology publishes a selection of reviewer comments, which are basically mean rejections. I suppose its a stab at scientific humor or a showing of how aggressive and mean scientists can be. Here are a few top comments from this year:*

• The biggest problem with this manuscript, which has nearly sucked the will to live out of me, is the terrible writing style.
• This is an interesting manuscript, not because of is results, but because of its complete ignorance of due scientific process
• I like lipids, but they have their limitations, which appear to have been overlooked in this article
• This was a possible candidate for the "worst use of statistics to substantiate a falsehood" award
• I nearly said reject, but then I recalled that I have a hangover and am feeling grump

I think that last comment is probably often true of the fate of our writing. *With thanks, via Harper's Magazine.

Your Writing Was the True Weakness of This Book

Here's a particularly harsh and extensive rejection sent in by an LROD Mouse:

Let me start by congratulation the author on the fortitude to pursue his or her dream. Almost everyone has a book within them, but it is a rare few who follow through. Now, let’s talk about the book.

In a nutshell, I thought it was very weak. Let me be more specific.

Story line/plot

It had a fairly decent story line/plot, but was poorly developed. For starters, it was disjointed and frequently hard to follow. Critical parts of the story line were introduced and explained away in a couple of sentences. There were some components that, if properly developed, could have been interesting. I found it amazing that despite the simplicity of the book, I still had a hard time understand parts of it.

Writing style

This was the true weakness of this book. By page 25, the author wore me out with “cute”. I think his writing skills were so weak, that he/she felt a need for the attempt at clever analogies and adjectives, some of which were clichest at best.

Character development

This is an easy part of my critique as there was no character development. The characters desperately needed background and expansion. A strong writer would have expanded the book by at least 50 pages worth of character development. There was not one person in the book that I felt I knew really well.

Where to go from here? 

With a lot of work, he can expand and clarify the plot; same goes for character development. It is the writing style that will be tough to change. I suspect the author likes his or her style a lot and would be reluctant to even try and change it.

I could have filled ten pages with criticisms and suggestions, but I figure this critique tells you enough of what I feel about the book. Again, I admire anyone who takes on the challenge of writing a book, but I’m afraid at this point, your author has no chance of getting it published.

Do Not Send Anything Else....Please

Not exactly literary, but don't you wish you wrote greeting cards instead of novels? A nice form rejection with a mean final exclamation: "Please do not send any further designs!" I guess that's pretty clear

Stealing Money From the Desperate

An uncscupulous group of swindlers give literary types a bad name across the globe. (In this scenario, hopeful writers are as vulnerable as old ladies.) As I always say about the darker side of humanity, people are goats; they'd eat your shoes if you let them.

Just-Plain-Bad-Taste Rejections (Love)

All's fair in love. Apparently. Makes me glad my rejections are mainly of the impersonal literary type.

Audacity Personified

Trying to forget....really? Read more from the source.

Grinchy Rejection

Here's one that's cold and Christmasy and cc'd to the mutual acquaintance who passed it along. "I absolutely believe that your children love it." Compassion, much?

"The manuscript you gave (a mutual friend) arrived today. I read it at once and am really sorry to have to tell you that I am afraid it is not something we can add to our list. I absolutely believe that your children love it, but there is a real difference between a told story and a written one. And I am afraid that [Title of Book] is just too slight and too sentimental to make a successful book. This is, of course, just one opinion, and I wish you every success with the project. All the best wishes for the holiday season.


Sincerely,


(name of lady agent)


cc: (mutual friend)"

You Write Like A Lizard Apparently

According to The Rejected Quarterly--not my Bible, but maybe should be--The Acorn sent the following rejection to Richard Kostelanetz: "The ability to string words together into a comprehensible phrase or sentence is what distinguishes human beings from a dictionary and the lower animal forms. When you have reached that stage in your development, try us again." Seriously?

Check, Check, Check & Check

Apparently, this guy's story was:

• Tedious and failed to hold the reader's interest
• Filled with an unacceptable number of grammar and spelling errors
• Overwritten and awkward 
• Dotted with static descriptions

Is that German for "Buzz Off, Bad Writer"?

I don't speak German, and the recipient of the above rejection, (worst)writer: trying to fail better, didn't explain the situation on his/her excellent blog, but I'm pretty sure there's some highly insulting German attitude going on here.  

Anyone care to translate and decode the snarky English marginalia?

Are We Non-Notable Bloggers?

A reader pointed out the interesting debate at Wikipedia about whether or not it was fair to delete the entry for Literary Rejections on Display.

Comments include the following:

• "A Google search reveals several thousand hits here though most of the sources are other blogs as farbric notes. Its [sic] a borderline subject. No Opinion at present but it seems to be a genuine site."


• "It clearly is a subject of interest among major literary figures who contribute to its debates."


• "Delete. It is a blog that doesn't appear to be have been covered in the mainstream media, or any other reliable source."


• "Delete non-notable, borderline speedy"


• "Keep. Good covereage at wet asphalt, entertainment weekly, the phoenix, other media-related sites. If we do reject the site, of course, it will add fodder the its own rejection theme."


• "Delete non-notable blog. Too little coverage in 3rd party sources."


• "Keep. Maybe Merge, clearly notable. Much of the coverage is under LROD. At a minimum, Somebody should probably write an article on [Jacob] Appel and include this as a subsection."

There's more over there in case you're interested, including the assertion that Joyce Carol Oates visits and blogs with us regularly. Nice, Wikipedia: forever passing along misinformation!

p.s. Though the polling function on Blogger is lame, I've got a little Wiki poll over to the right and down at the end of the column.  Please weigh in.

Wikipedia For A Day

The Wikipedia entry for Literary Rejections on Display, which some nice anonymous reader created, has been deleted!  The notation?  "This blog does not seem especially notable."  It's sort of like all the literary rejections I get.  Damn.  Can't catch a break!

Cake Walk

Gawker staffers, who apparently cannot get enough of Sloane Crosley (27 articles on her: damn, enough please!), have posted an amusingly inane video of the author chatting aimlessly about publishing snark.  She argues that it doesn't exist: "The idea of meanness is incredibly immature." (Guess she hasn't walked a mile in our tight shoes; we can talk about mean.)  Then, just in case, she tells all meanies to knock it off. 

And she's published, but you're not?  Egads.

Economy: Four-Word Rejection

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Shady Sheedy?

I once had a complicated writerly relationship with the agent Charlotte Sheedy and approached her to read my manuscripts (short story and novel). She wrote back to me instantly: "Of course we'll read your manucripts. Give us some time though because we have many books on the spring list and we're overwhelmed. Sorry you sent your work to [name of publishing house] with someone else. I have a lot of bestselling books over there."

I love that her response was both so positive ("Of course we'll read your manucripts"), and yet also so confidently discouraging ("Sorry you sent your work to [name of publishing house] with someone else [meaning my previous agent at the time, who came very close to selling something at said publishing house]. I have a lot of bestselling books over there.") As if I ruined my chances of getting published by having an agent who wasn't her! (I think that was meant to be a little bit mean.)

Anyway, in the end, Charlotte kindly passed my manuscripts off to her assistant agent, who rejected me in short order.

As Good As it Gets?

An anonymous blogger left the following comment on a recent post. You can see the comments section for my reply, but I wonder what you all think of this angry little rant:

"The publishing world is as good as it can be. There are already more books published each year than the market can really support, with publishing houses taking chances on new authors who will probably lose the company a lot of money and never earn back their modest advance. There are already more people employed whose sole purpose is to read manuscripts all day than the market can support. Ever wonder why most lit jobs pay so shitty? Because they hire 2 people to do the job of 1 person, and it's STILL a hard industry to break into because there are 6 people vying for those 2 jobs that could be done by 1 person. So I'd really like to know what you think needs to be done to make it better, besides publishing you specifically. Because, believe me, the cream always rises to the top - if someone goes so long with nothing but rejection, there's always a good reason, a fundamental flaw in their writing. You need tp step back and see what the common thread in all your rejections is - I'd be happy to point it out for you if you can't figure it out yourself, because it's fairly obvious from what you've posted to your blog thus far. But really, you're such a ball of negative energy, nothing short of getting published will appease you. Over on her blog, The Rejecter hit it on the head when she said that no rejection letter will ever be met with anything that isn't whining, no matter how nicely phrased it is. People like you make it such a no-win situation, no wonder most eds are switching to form letters - why bother trying to write a nice, constructive rejection letter when it will be met with the same sour bitterness that a "Fuck you, no way!" would have been. Might as well save your time and energy. "