One of the readers of Dennis’s Diary of Destruction, Anna of Anna’s Bee World, tagged both Dennis and me for a Six Facts meme. Dennis already has posted his, which means it’s time for me to post mine. But first, the rules:
Category: Writing
Random Rejection: Pulp Magazine
This week’s rejection “letter” can’t really be called a letter. To me, it looks more like a sign that you might see posted on the telephone pole outside your house advertising a garage sale, except in this case, it’s advertising that your submission will not be appearing in Pulp Magazine.
The Superior Scribbler Award
This week I got a cute addition to my iconography from Alyson over at Laugh in the Sun:
Random Rejection: Innovation
Here’s another example of a form rejection letter that manages to convey a little more information than just “go away”. While obviously not nearly as valuable as one that contains actual feedback, I was still happy to get this sort of rejection, because at least I felt that someone had taken the time to read what I sent them.
Review: “Homefront”
This week I finished up reading Homefront, by Kristen Tsetsi. (You may have seen the occasional comment from Kristen here.) I don’t usually write book reviews here, because it’s difficult to apply my snarky rating system to them (“this book put my wife to sleep in N minutes” … nah, doesn’t really work), but I’m making an exception for Kristen because I really want to encourage people to pick up her novel.
The Early Years: The Bike With A Brain
For school assignments, I always wrote a lot of what could charitably called “speculative fiction” (or, less charitably, “nonsense”). Here’s a very short example, most likely from elementary school, although it’s hard to tell because I didn’t bother to date it, or even to put my name on it:
NaNoWriMo
I had never heard of “National Novel Writing Month” until a very strongly-worded jab against its participants came through on one of my RSS feeds. So I went to have a look at the NaNoWriMo web site to see what it was all about. Basically, the idea is to encourage writers to bang out a 50,000-word novel during the month of November. As the web site says, “You will be writing a lot of crap”, but is that a bad thing?
Random Rejection: Ashley Grayson Agency
As I’ve mentioned before, I spent a lot of time trying to get an agent. A couple of times (three, to be exact) I succeeded in getting an agent. Unfortunately, Dan Hooker at the Ashley Grayson Literary Agency was not one of them.
The Early Years: “The Alien from the Planet Zorno”
Thanks to my parents’ ongoing efforts to clean junk out of their basement, I have been getting a steady stream of antediluvian scribblings (and typings). Here is a rather lengthy opus, most likely from when I was about ten, involving an alien saddled with a rather poor grasp of his own technology, not to mention a ridiculously hard to pronounce name.
Continue reading “The Early Years: “The Alien from the Planet Zorno””
Random Rejection: Design Image Group, “Night Watchman”
So one of the things you hear when you are submitting fiction, especially long-form fiction, is that lengthy response times are good. It means that the publisher is seriously considering your manuscript, that it has probably passed from the slush pile through the first readers and is perhaps, even right now as we speak, sitting on an editor’s desk awaiting the final stamp of approval before it is accepted.
Or it could just mean that your rejection letter was lost in the mail.
Continue reading “Random Rejection: Design Image Group, “Night Watchman””
Viscosity 