It’s been a while since I reached into my stack of rejection letters, so today I dove in and pulled this one out, from Maelstrom, for a short story called “Pinch Bobby ‘Til He Bleeds”.
Continue reading “Random Rejection: Maelstrom, “Pinch Bobby ‘Til He Bleeds””
Today I reached into my massive pile of rejections and pulled out a relatively boring one from Clocktower Fiction’s webzine. This one was for “Love and the Tides of Darkness”, a short story that I originally wrote specifically for an anthology called On The Eighth Day. I really liked this story and tried to sell it to a bunch of different markets, but once the year 2000 rolled around, it was pretty much obsolete.
I haven’t done a Random Rejection in a while, so I reached into my giant accordion file and pulled out a letter. This one is from the Seymour Agency in upstate New York (not far, in fact, from where I went to college). Their opinion is that the manuscript I sent, A Flock of Crows is Called a Murder, needs work; fortunately, they’re here to help.
So this week I reached into my vast collection of rejection letters and pulled out this one, from Schooner Bay Literary Agency:
Continue reading “Random Rejection: Schooner Bay Literary Agency”
So it seemed as if things were progressing nicely with Eclipse Comics … I was writing “Night Watchman” stories, my artist was drawing panels, and my editor was getting married and moving away. Good times for all concerned! Sadly, good times never seem to last …
Continue reading “Random Rejection: The Eclipse Comics Saga Part IV”
When we last left off with the Eclipse Saga Part II, I was getting good feedback from the editor at Eclipse Comics about “Night Watchman”. So, while I continued to work on that, I started sending him proposals for all the other series ideas I had. I don’t have the scripts for all of them, but they included several that eventually became novels, as well as others that remain on the shelf in my mind gathering dust.
Continue reading “Random Rejection: The Eclipse Comics Saga Part III”
So after getting those encouraging letters from the editor at Eclipse, I had to actually produce the scripts. Fortunately that wasn’t a problem; I was pretty prolific back in the day. However, formatting was an issue. From reading reference books (in 1993, you couldn’t just hop on the Internet to find examples of comic book script layouts), I was aware that when submitting comic book scripts as a writer, you have to format them similarly to a movie script, with the action divided into panels. You have to supply POVs, camera angles, etc., and each line of dialogue is numbered; this is all so the artist will know how to arrange everything on the page.
As you can see from the Eclipse editor’s copious notes, in this early Night Watchman draft, I wasn’t very good at any of that yet.
Continue reading “Random Rejection: The Eclipse Comics Saga Part II”
This week, I reached into the very back of my alphabetically-organized rejection list folder and pulled out this slip, from Francis Ford Coppola’s “Zoetrope” magazine:
Here’s what I consider an example of a form rejection letter done right: It doesn’t offer uselessly general advice, generic statements about what the agent is or is not looking for, lengthy attempts to justify the rejection, or nonspecific critiques. It’s just a simple “no thank you, try again”, which in my opinion is all a form rejection needs.
Continue reading “Random Rejection: Doyen Literary Services”
This week, I reached into my vast collection of rejection letters and pulled out this double-sider from Marietta Publishing:
Viscosity 