Silly Reasons
(sung to the tune of Silly Love Songs by McCartney and Wings)
You’d think that publishers would have had enough of silly reasons.
But I look at my email and I see it isn't so.
Some publishers wanna fill the world with silly reasons.
And what's wrong with that?
They’d like to know, cause here they go again
Yesterday I received one of the stranger rejections I’ve ever gotten. It was a form letter, with a checklist of reasons why my submission may have been deemed unworthy. The one with an x next to it for my 4 poems was “not long enough”. I’ll admit that when I read it I tilted my head like a confused dog.
In almost twenty years of submitting my work I have gotten thousands of rejections. I’ve been told my work was boring, cliché, “didn’t grab me”, had a bad ending, didn’t like the main character, wasn’t gory enough, was too gory, needed more zombies, needed less zombies, was too ‘woe-is-me’, “just published a story like this last month”, why are their aliens in the story at all?, etc. But I’ve never been told the sole reason was that it wasn’t long enough, especially since the guidelines did not have a minimum length requirement. Maybe it’s just me, but it seems like an odd reason.
One time an editor spent a paragraph telling me how great he thought my story was. He loved the action, the dialogue, the main character, the weirdness of it, everything. But . . . he couldn’t accept it because they had already acquired their quota for that month. Another one went on for several sentences explaining why my story didn’t work and I didn’t understand a word of it. I re-read it half a dozen times but couldn’t figure out what the editor was trying to say. I showed it to my sister who was an English teacher. Her verdict: It was gibberish.
Years ago, before email, I read a rejection letter where the editor was telling me all the things he would change in my story, except it wasn’t my story. It was obviously someone else’s as all the details he disliked were not part of the story I had sent him.
I once got a rejection email that started out “Dear Nadine . . .”
As with all writers I’ve gotten my share of head-scratching rejections. “Not long enough” has been added to the list. I can’t wait to see what tomorrow’s email brings.
You’d think that publishers would have had enough of silly reasons.
But I look at my email and I see it isn't so.
Some publishers wanna fill the world with silly reasons.
And what's wrong with that?
They’d like to know, cause here they go again
Yesterday I received one of the stranger rejections I’ve ever gotten. It was a form letter, with a checklist of reasons why my submission may have been deemed unworthy. The one with an x next to it for my 4 poems was “not long enough”. I’ll admit that when I read it I tilted my head like a confused dog.
In almost twenty years of submitting my work I have gotten thousands of rejections. I’ve been told my work was boring, cliché, “didn’t grab me”, had a bad ending, didn’t like the main character, wasn’t gory enough, was too gory, needed more zombies, needed less zombies, was too ‘woe-is-me’, “just published a story like this last month”, why are their aliens in the story at all?, etc. But I’ve never been told the sole reason was that it wasn’t long enough, especially since the guidelines did not have a minimum length requirement. Maybe it’s just me, but it seems like an odd reason.
One time an editor spent a paragraph telling me how great he thought my story was. He loved the action, the dialogue, the main character, the weirdness of it, everything. But . . . he couldn’t accept it because they had already acquired their quota for that month. Another one went on for several sentences explaining why my story didn’t work and I didn’t understand a word of it. I re-read it half a dozen times but couldn’t figure out what the editor was trying to say. I showed it to my sister who was an English teacher. Her verdict: It was gibberish.
Years ago, before email, I read a rejection letter where the editor was telling me all the things he would change in my story, except it wasn’t my story. It was obviously someone else’s as all the details he disliked were not part of the story I had sent him.
I once got a rejection email that started out “Dear Nadine . . .”
As with all writers I’ve gotten my share of head-scratching rejections. “Not long enough” has been added to the list. I can’t wait to see what tomorrow’s email brings.
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