Bob's Harshest Rejection Ever

I spent the past week doing a large project where I:

• Organized my google drive.

• Went through all my social media inboxes, tidying them and responding to things I missed.

• Organizing my email inbox for Tales by Bob and following up on things I missed.

If it sounds tedious, I promise you, it was. More than you can likely imagine. Anyway, as I was doing that I came across a folder where I had taken pictures of my old acceptances (few) and rejections (many) back when I was on the 'submitting to short story anthologies' grind. In all my rejections the vast bulk were pretty clearly form rejections. Fair. A few were personalized, and usually along the lines of 'hey, not right for us but you should send it somewhere else.' But there was one that was a bit more...rough. You can see it above.

Now to be clear, I can take criticism. My reputation for being able to take criticism was partly what got my first publishing deal. And honestly, I haven't taken a look at 'The Murder of Herbert Longmere' in years. It could very well be hot garbage (and likely is). And I am quite certain that the line:

"Second, the punctuation is shot! Where are your apostrophes? Missing in their hundreds!"

Is very accurate. Grammar? No thank you, not for me please, that's why I pay editors. I am surprised she chose apostrophes though, as usually it's commas I most heinously abuse. Just use this blog post as a case in point.

Jokes aside, in the moment that email destroyed me, I'm not gonna lie. I was a bit of a wreck because while I had been told a lot 'not good enough' I had always been told 'not good enough' politely, or at least formulaically. But here someone took time out of their day to write up a personalized message to tell me that:

• My story was not even a story.

• My publishing history to date was basically trash.

• That even reading her book might not be able to save my lack of ability.

Well fuck me that was a lot for a baby author to read. This was early, early on in my career, back before I was at least a little confident in my ability. I was at least a little proud of the fiction I had published to that point, but suddenly it seemed like I had achieved nothing at all.

But you know what, I kept at it, and now I'm here. And now a decade on I have some observations (of varying degrees of pettiness) that I wish I had known back then:

• How terrible is it that she plugged her own book on craft in the middle of telling me off? Not Stephen King's On Writing, or any other hugely popular book on the craft. No, she plugged her own book. I look at that now and shake my head, but back then I didn't think about how messed up that was. When I reread that line, I went to Amazon looked the book up and guess what? The second edition has two ratings on Amazon. The cover is god awful, but at least it's better than the cover it had back when the first edition came out, where, and I am not shitting you, the cover was sideways. As in the title, author, and subtitle all ran up and down vertically, not horizontally, in a bizarre almost neon glowing font that made the words almost ineligible. This was the person telling me to get my shit together.

• At the point this rejection came in I had been published in the Troy University Literary Journal twice, yes. But damn it I had also been published in Journals of Horror: Found Fiction from Terry M. West and the Avast, Ye Airships Anthology from Mocha Memoirs. Which is as genre fiction as you get. But also, while the other two were in a literary journal, they were absolutely fiction stories, not lectures. They were southern gothic stories set in Jubal County (before I knew Jubal County existed). The fact she dismissed my body of work because she perceived literary journals to be the equivalent of lectures should have warned me to maybe not take her opinion as law.

• When I got accepted by Mocha Memoirs (the editor Rie Rose Sheridan specifically (love her)) she let me know my grammar was fucked, but did it kindly. There are ways to say things without potentially crushing the spirit of someone. That doesn't mean you have to use baby soft kid gloves. You can tell it to folks straight, just don't be a dick about it.

• In a fit of petty I totaled up all her ratings and reviews across all of her works. Her number of works vastly outnumber my seven books (like fifteen to one, but she's an editor primarily), but I have more and better reviews. So nyah.

My point that I have been trying to make in super petty fashion is that before you let negativity ruin your day/week/month/year consider the source. I wish I had done my due diligence at that point, but to be honest it never occurred to me. At that point in my 'career' I just assumed that anyone putting out a book was an expert, and they had to know what they were doing. But one thing that I have learned for good or ill (mostly good) is that everyone in writing and publishing are just people. Some know more, some know less. Some treat folks with respect, some don't. So don't put anyone on a pedestal until you know they are actually worthy of being there (and can confirm that the pedestal has a weight limit that will support my fat ass).

Petty rant over! And no, I will not out who this editor was, don't ask. For all I know she spends her days adopting elderly dogs and volunteering at oil spills, and one kinda crappy email a decade ago is not enough for anyone to deserve to have their yum yukked.

At this point I just hope someone who got a shitty rejection letter sees this and feels a little better. I know I do after venting my spleen.