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.
Tag: rejection letters
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.
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Random Rejection: E-scape, “Comfort”
I got started submitting to online magazines way before they became mainstream, and had a number of short stories published by e-zines. E-scape, however, was not one of them, as they declined to accept my short story “Comfort”.
Random Rejection: “On The Eighth Day”
Back in the 90s, there was a lot of concern about the “Year 2000”, and this translated into a large number of film and fiction projects that dealt with the upcoming inevitable apocalypse. One of these was an anthology called On The Eighth Day, which almost included my short story, “Love and the Tides of Darkness.” Almost.
Random Rejection: The Missouri Review
In keeping with the I can’t believe I ever submitted to them theme of my last random rejection, this morning I reached into my vast file of “go away scum” letters and pulled out a rejection from The Missouri Review:
Random Rejection: The New Yorker
Before I came to realize that my style and subject matter were both completely unsuited for The New Yorker, I actually tried getting published there once or twice. No surprise: Rejected.
Random Rejection: The Panettieri Agency, “Long Before Dawn”
After our previous “random acceptance” anomaly, we’re back in familiar territory, with a rejection letter from a literary agent I was hoping to get to represent Long Before Dawn:
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Random Rejection: Sandra Dijkstra Agency, 1994
So one of the things I used to spend a lot of time on was trying to get a literary agent. (I’ve had a grand total of three over the years, and none of them ever sold a single thing. But that’s a different post …)
Here’s an exchange that’s pretty typical of how my interaction with a literary agent would go. First I would send a query (possibly including sample chapters), and then I would get back something like this:
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Random Rejection: “Leech Field”
So I’ve alluded to the fact that I have a file with a LOT of rejection letters in it. I thought it might be interesting to pull one at random from time to time and post it, so everyone can experience the fun of reading what I like to call “you suck” letters (even though they don’t generally actually say “you suck”). So here’s one from 2000, for a short story called “Leech Field”.
Viscosity 