Some astute observations from Teresa Nielsen-Hayden about slushpiles and rejection. Susan W., pay particular attention, because I think the issues she talks about tend to substantiate that your MS is getting serious professional consideration of the "almost buy" variety.

[link]

Thanks, Theodosia--I've bookmarked that for future reference and to take to my writers group.

And, yeah, it does sound like I'm making it into that top 1-5% with almost everyone who sees my manuscript. Which is not bad at all for a first novel, especially given that now that I'm looking at it after several months away, I can tell I submitted it before it was really ready. The story doesn't really pick up until Chapter Three, for example. And I knew that, and knew it was a strike against me, but I couldn't think of a way around it that would still get in all the backstory I need. Until now, after it's already been seen and rejected by three people. Now it's obvious--open with a dramatic incident currently in Ch. 3, flashback, flashback, a few dialogue explanations, and Bob's your uncle. Oops. From now on I'm going to do that thing all the books suggest where you set the manuscript aside for a month or two and give it one more edit before you submit. And I knew I should do that too, but I was afraid the contacts I'd made in early fall would go stale. Oh well.

That's a fascinating article.

Yeah, it really was. I have gotten many "nice" rejections...the rejected part still hurt though, but I have to join her in being boggled at the not-poem recognizing poet, and the one that got hurt because the total love letter rejection was not (quite) an acceptance.

Yeah, I can't imagine reacting that way to the gushing love letter reception--being grumpy that I'd had the bad luck to just miss the cut, sure, but encouraged all the same, and I'd have had that manuscript back out the door as fast as I could get to the post office.

(I didn't recognize the poem immediately, either, but I'm not a poet and almost never read modern poetry.)

I did, because I worked on the lit mag in high school, and if a poem was not about suicide or love gone wrong it was a knock-off of it. And I was a poet once...poets should know, it's iconic.(A little bit too iconic...I really do think.)

Between high school litmag and bad fanfic, I figure I'm pretty well inured to the worst of what the publishing industry can throw at me. Which is good, because I fully expect to spend a lot of time with the slush pile if I intern for a publishing company.

Between high school litmag and bad fanfic, I figure I'm pretty well inured to the worst of what the publishing industry can throw at me. Which is good, because I fully expect to spend a lot of time with the slush pile if I intern for a publishing company.

Heh, heh, heh.

You think you know. What you are. What's to come. You haven't even begun.

Holli, take it from someone who's done both sides of the fence, as writer and as publishing company employee: Victor is horribly, tragically right.

Holli, take it from someone who's done both sides of the fence, as writer and as publishing company employee: Victor is horribly, tragically right.

All I can say is, I hope that you never encounter work as horribly, horribly bad as the poem that made an editor friend of mine reply with the one sentence rejection letter, "I'm sorry. I was looking for something that was actually good."