Old road closed

1. Averil Dean

   Have you done any celebrating, Tetman? A little champagne, a cigar perhaps?

   # January 25, 2012 Reply
   • Tetman Callis

     My wife and I had dinner at a favorite diner this past Sunday. We hadn’t been there in a while. And the night after I received the email from Outpost19, telling me the book had been accepted, we drank a toast with cognac. It was Friday the 13th when the email arrived. I saw it in my Inbox but didn’t open it until late that night, since I figured it was going to be another rejection.

     # January 25, 2012 Reply
2. Averil Dean

   Friday the 13th is your new lucky day. It’s mine, too; Drew and I were married on Friday, October 13th, and ten years later we’re going strong.

   I am STILL getting rejections, though I haven’t sent anything out in at least six months. You’d think they could assume I’ve gotten the message without them actually sending it.

   # January 26, 2012 Reply
   • Tetman Callis

     When I was a boy I claimed Friday the 13th as my lucky day. Perverse lad. On Friday, October 13, 1967, I was trumpeting to my schoolyard friends how it was my lucky day when I backed into my girlfriend, Janice, who was running by while playing with her friends, and I knocked her down. Oops. She wasn’t my girlfriend much after that, but we were just kids. Really. I was nine and she was eight. This was right after the Summer of Love and everybody was getting an early start.

     I posted the above and almost forgot to continue my reply. My boss just called and wants me to do some work for him. I’ll get to that anon. What I was going to say was about what you said as to how rejections trickle in months after submissions. It’s been this way in this creative writing business as long as I’ve been in it (which is to say, since 1975). Six months has long been considered an acceptable time to wait for a response to an unsolicited submission. More recently, litmags and agents and publishers have taken to not responding at all, sometimes explicitly stating on their websites that if you haven’t heard back from them in X number of weeks or months or years, that means the answer is No. To me, it means other things in addition to that.

     # January 26, 2012 Reply
3. Averil Dean

   Hmm. That’s good to know. I do think receiving a rejection months later is like reopening an old wound, but then that’s true of almost all things in writing.

   # January 26, 2012 Reply
   • Tetman Callis

     On this very subject, I received today a rejection of a story I submitted to a litmag seventeen months ago. The editors said they really enjoyed it, and encouraged me to submit again. I had long since given up on them and sent the story out again.

     # January 26, 2012 Reply

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