Random Rejections: Welsh Publishing Group

So this week I decided to ask the Gods of Randomness to pick a folder and position in my vast trove of rejection (and a few acceptance) letters, and lo! They told me I should look in the folder labeled “W” and find the seventh item therein, which, as it turns out, was in fact two items stapled together. Here’s the first one:

So apparently I was inquiring of some kind of print magazine for The Real Ghostbusters (which, for the uninitiated, was the name that Columbia Pictures had to use for their media related to the 1984 film Ghostbusters ― maybe you have heard of it? ― due to the fact that they didn’t come up with the “Ghostbusters” name themselves; rather, they licensed it from another company that had already been using it, albeit with a space in the name. This may remind the nerds out there of how Apple had to license the name “iOS” from Cisco. Apparently such things are neither case- nor whitespace-sensitive.

Anyway, apparently, somewhere, I had gotten hold of The Real Ghostbusters as a potential market in 1992. This was back in those antediluvian times when we had to use printed materials as references, rather than the Internet, and printed materials are notoriously fixed in stone* once they have been printed. So in this case I probably got a copy of like one of the old Writer’s Digest market list books (which, astonishingly enough, are apparently still available) and decided that TRG was a likely target for my stuff. Maybe it would’ve been, if it hadn’t stopped being a going concern some two years earlier. But never fear! They also have media tie-ins for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Garfield, and other projects. Hmm, given the stuff I used to write, would I be better off submitting to TMNT or Garfield**? Hmm … And so that brings us to the second stapled page:

So apparently I did submit something to TMNT magazine, a story called “CD Blues”, which I do not seem to have a copy of on my computer. This is unprecedented***, as I never lose anything. I’m pretty sure that, slouching around somewhere on my computer, there are PC-Write files of my very earliest stuff, such as Long Before Dawn, which was written on a DOS machine when I was in my early twenties***.

One interesting thing about this letter is the part about “my compliments to you for having the wherewithal to follow up after so long a time”, which uncharitable minds might interpret as “I was hoping you were gone”, but who knows? It could be sincere. Anyway, the reason I was able to follow up on this submission after however long it had been**** is that, surprising no one, I had made myself an MS Access database for keeping track of submissions and responses, which I used to make sure nothing fell through the cracks unless I wanted it to*****. I don’t use it anymore (for one thing, I haven’t had a personal Windows machine since like 2004), but I apparently did dump a report of submissions before moving away from the platform. Here’s the page that includes this submission:

A few notes about this list:

• Look how instead of just going to peoples’ web sites and obtaining information directly, I had to send out all those requests for information, guidelines, lists, etc., like some kind of barbarian.
• This is so long ago I was still submitting things as “Jim Viscosi” instead of “James V. Viscosi”, which, I mean, sounds so much more authorial, right?******
• This is also long ago that I was still writing comic book proposals.
• Speaking of which, wow, check out all the agencies who didn’t want to rep comic books. It sure is a shame superhero properties never became profitable.
• The astute reader will notice “Tales from the Dragon” and “Television Man” amongst the submissions that were rejected. These were both comic book proposals that eventually became, respectively, the best-selling******* novel Dragon Stones and, uh, well, Television Man.
• “Madam Morphosis” was a character that I made for my wife when she was going to try playing the Marvel Super-Heroes RPG with me********. Apparently I decided to write a comic book involving this character. I have no idea what it was about.
• I don’t really remember the storyline for Disguise, which I sent to the Wilshire agency, but I do remember that the main character ― an innkeeper named Aldric Goldshine ― and his pet “cat” Trouble eventually ended up as important characters in the “Strings” duology. (Yes, the “cat” was an important character too.)

* Uhh, I mean, paper.
** Given the stuff I write now, there would, obviously, be a different answer.
*** Speaking of antediluvian times …
**** Around three months, which doesn’t seem like THAT long.
***** Back in a more innocent time on the Internet, I even posted this database on my website for other writers to download and use. Because surely downloading MS Access databases from random people on the World Wide Web is completely safe, right?
****** Jim Butcher notwithstanding …
******* In the UK epic fantasy Kindle store, anyway.
******** Her powers were, per my wife’s request, the ability to change shape and to generate a “pea soup fog”.