Not shocked. They haven't been relevant since Norman Rockwell was designing their covers. Seems their values haven't changed much since then either.
Oof. It's got a real snide feeling to it. Celebrating the good shouldn't mean pretending flaws don't exist. What was the rejected story about? I'm guessing it wasn't sufficiently "celebratory" for them?
I have been getting typical rejections too. If you'd like, perhaps we can trade projects for beta reading.
One Story form rejection. It was the higher one where they say they "really enjoyed your story." @Alex R. Encomienda: I'm not opposed to trading stories, but I'm not looking for my work to be torn apart for the sake of finding and pointing out flaws. Beta reading doesn't always go well and I think that depends on how people approach it. I have met someone through here that read my work and gave me awesome and helpful feedback. If you want to do this with me, I say we send each other our best stories. Polished. The finished product. I feel like then we might be able to offer each other insight into why our best stories are not getting picked up. What do you say?
Yes, I agree. Go ahead and nitpick all you want on mine because I've heard the worst about my work already. Can't get any worse than "I don't know what we established here." Pm me your email and I'll give you mine.
Two rejections today. Ploughshares and The Kenyon Review. I waited a little over a month on both of these. Both were form rejections in response to my best work. Good thing I wrote a new story today that has the potential to be even better than those two rejected stories. I'm learning this is not really about the stories I've written and more about what I can do now. I think I'm in the process of reinventing myself as a writer.
Got a higher tier rejection for a piece of tie-in fiction this week. That's all well and good (better than the lowest form), but at the end the editor goes "We hope you find a better fit for it elsewhere." Like, this was written for your IP, nobody else is going to take it. If you're working in publishing, I'd think you'd know that.
I think it's like getting rejected for a date. They always try to say something nice and/or let you down easy, which I suppose it preferable to a "Hell, no! You're fat, ugly, and stupid and I wouldn't mate with you if you were the last guy on Earth!"
Yeah I suspect "we hope you find a better fit for it elsewhere" is as sincere as "I don't like you like that" both clearly mean FOAD
I assume that rejections, even above the lowest tier, are written (or perhaps assembled from boilerplate) too fast for nuances like that to register. In the rejection-writer's mind that paragraph is probably just a standard, "Your stuff is decent! Good luck!" salute, one that doesn't get evaluated for literal meaning. (Edited to add: I say this with zero knowledge of the industry, but with a fair bit of awareness of people's failure to process the difference between literal meaning and intended meaning of their words, especially when they're in a hurry.)
At my job, even when someone is fired for gross negligence, HR's announcement email regarding their departure always ends with "We wish them luck in their further endevors." No we don't, you suck and we hope no one ever has to work with you again.
I'm sure that's the idea, I'd just think that if you were working on such a project you'd pick a different boilerplate phrase.
Unless a rejection comes directly from an editor's email with an invite to submit something else, I don't really care how high of a rejection it is. Does it even matter? Sure, a real personal rejection can briefly lift your spirits, but I've got enough rejections of all kinds to know that unless an editor writes me specifically with an invite to bypass the slush pile, it doesn't really make a difference at all.
I'd say whether it matters depends on what you want to know. A regular form rejection might tell you that the story either wasn't that good or wasn't what the market was looking for. A higher form could tell you that you're on the right track. The same with a personal rejection, with the added benefit of knowing exactly why it was turned down. Obviously, if you have high confidence in the story and your feel for the market, the above won't matter. On the bright side of things, my rejection streak has been broken. By no means are they prestigious acceptances, but they're encouraging none the less.
After a long wait, just got a personal rejection from a great place. Unfortunately, my story wasn't great enough, though, they did use the word "great" to describe my story. There was nothing saying why it was rejected in the end. I think the close calls hurt the most.
Knock, knock, literary world. It's not that no one is coming to the door. It's just that no one is letting me in. Fifty-five-day form rejection from Copper Nickel.
I just checked. Angus & Robertson are/were a publishing house in Australia. And there is an FB Meyer (apparently a writer of religious tracts) who has a few books on Amazon marked 'classics.' So who knows? Maybe he tweaked a letter in his name, and kept on trucking.
I've gotten some not so nice rejections. They suck, but sometimes they really push us in the right direction. Make us try harder, work more, elevate our skill set so we may reach the levels where are work is not laughable to these editors but publishable. Or some people are just dicks.
