Check out
this amazing blog post at Author! Author! about what rejections were like in the 1950's. You think we've got it bad? See what
Anne Mini remembers hearing tell from her mother Kleo Apostolides Dick Mini and her mother's first husband,
Philip K. Dick, as they struggled to get published.
Here are some highlights to an excellent article:
"One of the great advantages of growing up in a family of writers (my father, uncle, brother, and a hefty percentage of the family’s friends all hammered away on the same anvil) is not only seeing with one’s own wee eyes that making a living at it is indeed possible, but also hearing from one’s cradle continual confirmation that yes, baby, even the most talented writers on earth have had to struggle with rejection. Or, to be precise, one is told that back in the day, it wasn’t easy, either. Heck, writers in the 40s and 50s evidently had to walk uphill both ways to the post office in three feet of snow to submit hand-typed manuscripts to agents and editors.
Return with me now to those thrilling days of yesteryear, when books were widely read, writers didn’t need agents, and the photocopier had not yet been invented. Prior to personal computers (and nice laser printers in workplaces that might conceivably be accessible after the boss goes home for the day), a writer could not print out spare copies of your precious manuscript to submit to every Tom, Dick, and Random House in the biz; equally obviously, no sane human being would send out his only copy.
So how did writers reproduce their work to submit to several publishing houses? They retyped it, that’s how. Every single page.
This is the origin of the SASE, in case any of you had been wondering: getting their rejected manuscripts back would save writers weeks of retyping time...
When a short story was rejected — as, in the beginning, all of Philip’s and Kleo’s were — and landed once again in their mailbox with the accuracy of a well-flung boomerang, they acted as professional writers should act: they submitted the rejected story to another magazine immediately. To minimize retyping, they would iron any pages that had gotten bent in the mail, slip the manuscript into a fresh envelope (yes, with a fresh SASE), and pop it in the mail.
How many? Well, no one knows for sure anymore (since occasionally the only copy of a story got sent by mistake, some inevitably got lost), but one day, the young couple opened their front door to find 17 rejected manuscripts spread all over their miniscule front porch."
So, just think, we could be ironing bent pages, folks. We could be typing fresh copies of every page. It is a luxury that we get to sit around this blog and bitch about our misfortunate. I actually found Anne Mini's article quite inspirational, until I got to the part about her own memoir,
A Family Darkly: Love, Loss, and the Final Passions of Philip K. Dick, which is...guess what?...languishing unpublished due to woes you and I only have nightmares about.
This is a very good writer, people, with something to say about an interesting literary life; this is a book writers would really want to read, and I bet it's not fabricated! But, you know how it goes; they can get O.J. Simpson into print, but they can't work out the legal details of the Dick estate. Isn't that always the way?
An anonymous LROD reader sent in this rejection from an anonymous source, which I assume is a literary magazine or a small press: "We regret to inform you that, for whatever reason, your manuscript was not selected for publication. Please note that this does not reflect badly upon you, as a writer, but upon we, as a publication."
Many bloggers appear to be attempting to deal with literary rejection by blogging on the subject. Here are a few noteworthy examples: 
Check out this amazing blog post at Author! Author! about what rejections were like in the 1950's. You think we've got it bad? See what Anne Mini remembers hearing tell from her mother Kleo Apostolides Dick Mini and her mother's first husband,Philip K. Dick, as they struggled to get published.
An anonymous LROD reader sent in this irritating rejection, received from a non-mainstream press: Dear Writer, Rejected: I think that what you have here is a wonderful , original idea. But, alas, I fear it is much better an idea than it would be a book. Still, I would like very much for you to prove me wrong, and I wish you all success with this proposal. Signed, (Annoying) Editor
An inspiring post over at Circe's Kitchen concerning our old friend Jack Kerouac. Here's a highlight:
The anonymous LROD reader submitting this form letter for our consideration was duly insulted by the lack of pride this literary magazine takes in the professional business of rejecting people. The rejected party offers up this amusing rant by way of a critique:
Thanks to an anonymous tip, here's some juicy insight into the strange business of the free online magazine Narrative (topic of much LROD speculation) in the form of an SF Chronicle article.
An anonymous reader sent this fun story in for your consideration:
Remember Jacob Appel, the Golden Appel? The guy who wins all the contests you lose. Well, an anonymous reader sent in this update about him, another win, and a story you can read and judge...something about the "irrelevancy" of "stolen baboons." The anonymous submitter of this item says: "He beat me twice in one week in two different genres! Maybe he's cheating :)"
More on the faked memoir story and former Scribner editor Sarah McGrath in an article at Gawker. This time there's a link to McGrath's rejection letter on LROD:
The literary magazine West Branch rejects you by quoting an inane rejection of Proust. Then a simple statement: "Thanks for sending to WEST BRANCH. Though we have decided not to publish you work this time, we appreciate your interest in the magazine. Simple, yet pretentious, wouldn't you say?
A fascinating article over at Salon by Stephen Marche says "Alain Robbe-Grillet turned the masses against inventive fiction. Now that he's dead, will experimental writing make a comeback?" Interesting.
