I had worked the damn story to
the point where, if I had read it to my wife one more time, she was going
to sever my larynx while I slept. You want to talk about work-shopping a piece
before you submit it? I reviewed a dozen stories a day, hoping for some useful
advice, something I could do to shore up my characters or bolt the plot harder
to the deck. Twenty-seven revisions, twenty-seven freakin’ revisions! If Moses
had taken the Ten Commandments through that much nitpicking, he’d ‘a cut it down
to one triple-word construct—
Thou Shalt Not—and submitted it to the
masses. And when I was certain in my heart that there was nothing left to
change, no possible plot hole left unfilled, no typos, punctuation errors, or
inadvertently omitted words, I emailed the gem to the one magazine I’d
specifically written it for, the one I’d been trying to get published in for
over five years.
It took them four hours and thirty-one minutes to reject it.
Now, first of all, you have to
understand their website alerts writers to a four to six-month response time;
patience, they remind us, is a virtuous avocation (in other words, don’t call us
until three days after Hell freezes over). They claim to receive thousands of
submissions a month and with the current economic crisis, two of their five
editors have sought employment where a paycheck rather than a copy of the
magazine is handed out on Friday afternoon. So when they tossed the most
brilliant piece of literary prose to come from my keyboard in four hours and
thirty-one minutes, I couldn’t help but think it was a mistake.
I replied to the electronic rejection slip:
“Gentlemen or Ladies, as the case may be, I believe there’s been a
mistake. Perhaps I’ve overlooked something in your guidelines or possibly an
electronic glitch in the file you received. I am resubmitting my story as an
attachment to this email in .RTF rather than .DOC format, which your guidelines
say was acceptable.
Thanks for giving me the opportunity to submit; I look forward to good
news in a few months from you.”
With that, I shutdown the laptop and went to the beach; shit, I’d earned
it.
In the three hours I’d been gone,
I’d developed a magnificent character in my head: a hybrid of WC
Fields, Donald Trump, and Captain Kangaroo. All I needed was a plot and I could
start writing. My wife had gone out to play
mah jong with her cronies
and, for the balance of the afternoon, I had the quiet of the lanai, a tasty
bottle of single malt, and a cool breeze to keep me company. I booted the
portable, pouring myself a bit more than a dram, while it rolled through its
always-too-long wakeup routine. Diligent as I am about such things, anal if you
ask my wife, I checked for new email before starting the new piece.
Had I waited ten minutes longer before leaving for the beach, I would
have read their response while it was still fresh. Yet three hours later,
revived from the deep freeze of some distant server, the words instantly turned
the pleasures of the whiskey into vinegar:
“There was no mistake; your story is not the sort of thing or the level
of quality we’re looking for. Best of luck placing it in some lesser journal.
Passionately yours,
The Editorial Staff”
The Editorial Staff?
Which one? Which of the three remaining editors had the time to read my five
grand worth of words ahead of the other 999 stories they’d already received that
month? Which one of these assholes was ramming his editorial staff up my keister
with this bullet-train review process?
I finished the scotch in a single gulp and spit off this reply:
“Dear Editorial Staff: I have been reading your magazine for more than
five years. I have been writing for twice that time and have had stories
published in many journals equivalent in quality to yours. Truthfully, some have
been better, but yours is the one I’ve always felt deserved a piece by me. The
story I’ve once again attached to this email is the result of twenty-seven
revisions and reviews by some of the finest writers in the world today. Please
take a moment and give me some clue as to why you’ve rejected it and why it was
done so quickly. Thanks.”
I clicked Send and refueled my glass. My email program is designed to
check for new messages every five minutes. I selected the Settings tab and
changed it to three.
While the clock in the
lower corner of my screen ticked off the minutes, I opened the story in Word and
printed a copy. Maybe there was something deep in the story I couldn’t see, some
fatal error that I’d overlooked. The email probed for business three times while
I read and when I was done, there was nothing I could imagine changing, nothing
that looked askew. I clicked the Check Email button, watching as several new
messages were sucked onto my screen.
The first four were spam that had managed to evade my usually reliable
filter; I deleted them without reading. The fifth was from my wife, sent on her
iPhone (a gadget I couldn’t possibly understand and which she normally left in
the car), reminding me to take the steaks out of the freezer lest we eat tuna
fish again tonight. I shook my head and deleted the message; she’d left the
steaks in a throwaway pan on the counter before heading out. The sixth message
was from The Editorial Staff:
“You wasted that much time on this drivel? What does that tell you about
your prospects as a writer?
Passionately yours,
The Editorial Staff”
Whoa, this was getting
way beyond profes-sional now. Hey buddy, let’s see some of your writing, okay?
Let’s see what your qualifications are to sit in judgment over me. How about
your real name for starters? I was about to pen a response to this butt plug but
went to the browser instead. My online writing group had most certainly
submitted to this magazine; it was time to out this offensive chap.
I skipped the
WritMails and notices of new reviews and went
straight to the Open Forum to post the following:
“What would you say to this sort of rejection letter and the subsequent
responses?”
I copied and pasted all
the emails into the post, removing the magazine’s name and the title to my
story. The last part proved unnecessary, as just about everyone online had read
the piece at least twice and knew exactly which story I was referring to.
The thread grew to a hundred posts in less than an hour, an hour that I
had forced myself not to check email. All of them followed a basic outline of
shock, horror, dismay, and outright embarrassment that such a prestigious
magazine could have such a caustic editor. However, there was not one post from
anyone who had received such treatment from that same journal. A few posts
mentioned other magazines, both printed and electronic, that had been terse or
simply mechanical in their rejections, but none that been as outright rude as
mine. I savored another dram of the single malt, feeling somewhat relieved that
the rest of the world was on my side.
With my army of supporters patting my back and urging me to strike out,
I switched from browser to email, fully prepared to take this bastard on
headfirst. It took four revisions of my email before I hit Send:
Copyright ©2010 Calliope, All rights reserved.
Calliope
5975 W. Western Way
PMB 116Y
Tucson, AZ 85713
“Dear Passionate Editorial Staff: I'm curious. What can you offer in
terms of your own writings that I may understand your qualifications? I’ve been
a writer for ten years, how long have you been in the trade? And wouldn’t it
make more sense for you, assuming you’ve a level of experience at least equal to
mine, to offer positive criticism rather than degrading remarks? I’ve discussed
your emails with my online writing group, one that I'm certain you’re aware
of—WriteRead—and everyone is as puzzled as I am in trying to understand how such
a superb magazine would have an editorial staff that treated writers in this
manner. I passionately await your reply.”
I reset the automatic check mail
feature to five minutes and went into the kitchen to season the steaks and throw
them in the refrigerator. There was a bottle of white wine, still room
temperature, having resided in the wine rack for several months, squeezed into
the door between the milk and the orange juice. I pulled it out and laid it on a
shelf next to the bag of celery; twenty years together and she still couldn’t
get the red and white thing squared away. A ‘02 Bordeaux was more appropriate
for tonight; I stood the bottle in the shaded corner of the countertop and set a
pair of the large wineglasses next to it. She loved to uncork the bottles with
some electrical gadget from Bed, Bath, and Things, one of our primary vendors,
right up there with the phone company and the tax assessor, and woe be it to the
husband or dinner guest who denied her that pleasure.
My preliminary kitchen chores complete, I returned to the lanai and
awakened the screen; the third message down was the one I was waiting for:
“You complained about our magazine on WriteRead? What, you didn’t think
we’d find out? You little shit. It’s a good thing we tossed your story in the
rubbish bin. You probably would have complained if it were the second story in
an issue instead of the lead. You can tell all your little writing friends that
we know what’s going on at their websites. We have people salted into all the
Discussion boards at all the writing workshops online. Complain about us and
retribution will be swift and final. Don’t bother submitting anything else to
us; your name is now permanently ensconced in a list of undesirables.
Passionately yours,
The Editorial Staff”
The Wicked Witch of the West
replaced Captain Kangaroo in my potential new character and any concept
of a plot that may have been brewing in my mind was discarded in anger. With my
fingers poised over the keyboard, ready to sling electronic spears through the
ether toward this jerk, I paused and re-read the line about having spies in the
workshop.
We have people salted into all the Discussion boards at all the
writing workshops online.
That just didn't seem plausible. What? Did every highly regarded
magazine monitor the
vox populi? If so, did they adjust to the comments
or recoil in fear? Was Big Brother really watching or was this editor full of
crap? And why would this knowledge be revealed to me now, and why only me?
Even more important though, was getting this news in the hands of
everyone else on WriteRead. My God, there had been all sorts of threads over the
past five years that cast aspersions on certain magazines; who knew how much
damage we were foisting on our careers by speaking our minds? I had to alert my
friends…
…assuming they were my friends.
I dropped my hands into my lap
and stared out at the lake in the distance. How would I know? I mean, how many
reviews had I received that may have been bogus? How much advice had I blindly
accepted, modifying my stories based on what appeared to be the sage
pronouncements of writers who I had accepted as mentors? Who were the editorial
operatives disguised by false screen personalities, doling out misinformation
that kept good writers, nay, excellent writers, from reaching those gold rings
on the merry-go-round of literary fame?
Even with the drift of air conditioning and the artificial wind of the
ceiling fan above me, I began to sweat, my fingers reaching for the mouse and
falling away as the fear of reprisal and its subsequent demolition of my
publishing prospects refused to let me click. The possibility of taking the
entire WriteRead community down loomed in the forefront of my consciousness as
though a darkening sky was bringing destruction in hundred-mile-an-hour winds
and flooding rains.
Forcing myself to a modicum of calm,
I held a long breath, and was about to slide the mouse over the browser icon
when an email blipped onto the screen. Next to the sender’s name was a red
exclamation point, the symbol of urgency in an electronic hail of messages. The
sender was the magazine, my adversary, who had unleashed the hounds of Hell upon
what was to have been my day of glory and relief. I opened the missive and
leaned in toward the screen so as not to miss a single pixel of what was
displayed:
“To our most valued writers: Apparently a rogue editor, one who recently
left our employ, had set a trap to waylay incoming emails to his personal
computer. Several of you may have received rejections from this person in error
today. Rest assured that these did not originate from us, the trap has been
sealed, and while we regret any inconvenience, this is just another one of the
foibles of the digital age. Unfortunately, this former employee was also able to
delete all existing submissions, and we ask that you resubmit any story that has
not be accepted or rejected by our editorial staff. We thank you for your
support in the past and look forward to reading your work.
Passionately yours,
The Editorial Staff”
About the Author
Ricky Ginsburg has changed hats several times in his 56 years. He spent
over 15 years as the purchasing agent for one of the northeast’s largest
wholesale stationers before leaving the company to start a software design
company in the mid-80’s, that has over 75 clients spread across the country
today. Since moving to South Florida in 1998, he has become a successful
landscape and garden designer, having constructed tropical paradises for
homeowners throughout Palm Beach, Broward and Dade counties. His garden, on a
quarter acre of land in western Boca Raton, contains over a thousand different
plants, three water features and twenty-eight different species of palm trees.
His first published fiction was a nine-part tale of competition barbecue
in 2004 in
The National Barbecue News, which has been preserved on his
web site (
http://www.fawnridge.com/ricky),
as a series of web pages. Most of his technical writing since living in Florida
is related to horticulture. He also writes a monthly column in a community
newsletter and had an article in the last issue of
Zone 10 Gardening
Magazine.
He began writing short stories in October 2006, and has penned over 200
stories in a plethora of genres since. Currently he has short stories published
in dozens of on-line and print magazines, most notably,
Skive, a
quarterly publication, where he is a regular contributor.
Ricky has had more than his fair share of fame, with almost eleven years
at WFMU radio and two and a half years at WBCN-Boston. His radio show at
WFMU—Synthetic Pleasure—had, for over five years, more than a half-million
listeners and was most famous for his discovery of Yanni. He also wrote and
published a magazine called
Synthetic Pleasure that had over 1,000
subscribers at its apogee.