15 January 2004

Well, Now That I've Gotten That Out Of The Way ...

I had been expecting it, of course. I knew going into this business that I would see several hundred rejections before I saw my first acceptance. In a way I suppose it's a good thing that I got the first one over and done with.

The rejection letter came from Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, to which I had sent Remote Control. It was a form letter, of course. There was no particular name attached to the letter, it was on behalf of the entire editorial team. The letter assured me that at least one person on the team had read my manuscript but lamented that it did not meet their needs at this time. I suppose it could have been a lot worse. I was half expecting something encouraging me to take my manuscript and fold it into sharp corners and practice object insertion on myself.

I imagine it will be interesting to see the rejection letter from Analog, when I get it. Considering that both magazines are published by the same company I would imagine that they both use the same form letter for rejections, they just change the logo in the letterhead. That's how I would do it.

Of course, if I was the editor of a major magazine like that I would have several classes of rejection letter. The first class, and the one used most often, would be for those cases where the work involved was simply horrid and the writer responsible for it should probably be ashamed of themselves. The second class would be for those promising cases where you can see some amount of talent or skill in the work in question, bur for one reason or another it just doesn't make the cut. The third class would be for those instances where the work in question is certainly publishable, but your editorial calendar is well and truly booked and you just don't have any room to accommodate the new story.

Now, assuming that the Dell publishing group would operate on the same kind of logic, I wonder which class of letter it is that I received. Certainly the wording is polite enough, and just encouraging enough to keep a prospective writer from giving up all hope. They even wished me luck in finding a publisher for Remote Control elsewhere.

Then again, it's also ten in the morning, and I'm awake when I shouldn't be, and I'm probably reading something into this whole thing that I shouldn't have. The point of this is that I got the first rejection out of the way. The hard part is now over. Everything gets easier from here.

At least that's what I keep telling myself.