MASSIVE PEOPLE (2): Writer, Rejected
Writer, Rejected runs a blog called Literary Rejections on Display. It is probably obvious that I am sort of addicted to this site. I go through phases: I check it regularly, then I stop myself and ignore it for several months. Then I remember it again and sift through its wreckage. The site frustrates me quite a lot, actually. I don’t mean Writer, Rejected frustrates me as an anonymous online person (Writer, Rejected was nothing but kind during our email exchange), even though sometimes her/his posts at LROD are a bit offputting. Instead, I mean that many of the users who troll the site to leave their weird comments frustrate me. I don’t understand why writers get so indignant when it comes to rejection letters: they overanalyze any slight variations between form letters; they put a lot of meaning into ‘inked’ rejections; they throw fits when some editor out there commits some injustice against the literary world, be that an offense against some odd aesthetic floating around on the internet (‘good fiction’) or against some struggling writer. Sure, I know about rejection – I remember when I first started submitting places. And I also have problems when it comes to how long some journals take to respond. But Jesus Christ, people. Get over yourselves. It’s part of the ‘game.’
My own opinions aside, Writer, Rejected has built a ‘massive’ following online because of her/his blog. Lots of people go there and read about the latest advances in rejection and in responding to rejection. There are posts of specific rejection letters, posts about journals that have fucked up in some way, posts about authors who have fucked up in some way, and other things of interest. If anything, there is always some sort of spectacle to look at over there. I like this about the site.
Writer, Rejected was patient enough to deal with my lame questions. And recently, Writer, Rejected asked his/her readers to grade the LROD blog. So I figured I’d administer my own little quiz, I guess. Each question is worth five points. There is also a bonus question.
What follows are Writer, Rejected’s responses to my email quiz questions (beware of the jump).
1. ‘Professionalism.’ We don’t really know what that word means at HTMLGIANT, but I have seen it in comments on your blog, usually in phrases like, ‘this blog lacks professionalism’ and ‘you are ruining your writing career,’ etc. Could you define ‘professionalism’ for us and maybe talk about it, I don’t know, something related to your blog, and also maybe talk about the words ‘writing’ and ‘career’ as a phrase? Why is this a concern of some of your ‘readers’?
Professionalism is never having to say you’re sorry…unless you are sorry, in which case, professionalism gives you the balls to say so. From my perspective, it’s a lot like love: best accomplished by being who you are. For me, making a point about the absurdity we’ve reached in literary fiction is more important than saving my own ass. If someone doesn’t want to publish me because of my blog, or because I published his or her rejection letter, I have to say that I’m pretty sure it won’t be the worst reason for rejection I’ve ever gotten, or ever will get.
I Am Stupid When It Comes To Politics – Ignore Me
A few days ago, Shane Jones threatened to write an essay about the ‘politics’ of online writer’s blogs and the online lit scene in a recent post on his blog. For the record, Shane Jones does not link to my own personal blog, but I link to him from my own personal blog. Co-Editor of The Cupboard, Adam Peterson, links to my own personal blog but I do not link to his personal blog. Darby Larson links to my personal blog, but I have not linked to his personal blog. Jereme has linked to my blog, but I have not linked to his. I have linked to Sam Pink’s blog, but he has not linked to me. Fuck Sam Pink.
In good news, I have linked to Matthew Simmons, and he has linked to me. I have linked to Kendra Grant Malone and she has linked to me. Congratulations, everyone.
Nowadays, there’s just so much out there! So many blogs to read! The internet is so busy! Look here and here for proof. Wow! And it’s so hard to copy and paste a web address and add it to your list of links on the side of your minima-black-themed blog. Who reads all of them anyhow? What’s the use? Eventually you just get overwhelmed. Laziness interecedes. Some people just type stupid shit and publish it. Sometimes it’s not even worth your time to click on or link to certain people. And sometimes you just want to show that asshole Blake Butler that you’re more picky than he is (Blake Butler links to EVERYONE!!!). Why not try to limit your scene? Save some time? Tao Lin is famous for this: he links to twelve people and is very picky as to who he links to based on some ‘life-affirming’ philosophy, I think. I could be wrong though. I recall a post he wrote about it. You’d have to dig it up. Google it or something.
But, really, who can we count on to back us up? Does this matter? Does linking to people matter?
Probably not. This is a lame post. I forgot what I really meant to type here. Politics and something. I don’t know. I am drunk.
I don’t think that I should link to Mark Sarvas. He won’t back me up. And I haven’t read Harry, Revised, nor do I plan to, but man, that guy must get a lot of hits…if only he could send some of that my way. Although, maybe he isn’t cool enough, and besides, his readers might not understand my waste-paper-throwing-game. Or maybe I’m not cool enough.
I’m bored with everyone. I want to read new things. I want to find new blogs and literary sites that I can read. What am I doing wrong? Why is my blogroll so lame?
Give me some links.
‘This book is a catalog of the life project’
I am in a bad writing phase or something. I haven’t been writing very much recently. Instead of writing, I’m reading a lot of things: student papers, composition textbooks, books to review, and then some stuff to make me feel better. Everyone has that shelf or two of books that they read to feel better, I guess. I’m rereading Ben Marcus. Slowly. I just finished Notable American Women a few days ago. Now I’ll start The Age Of Wire And String. I pulled the book off my shelf to look at it and a few pieces of paper fell out.
I might have shown this to a couple of people, so sorry if this is old news.
On the papers is an index. I made an index of all the terms Marcus defines in the book and listed the page number of the definition. I made this index one summer a few years ago. I enjoyed making it. It made me feel busy and involved in something. I don’t know if it is worthwhile. I don’t even know if this makes sense.
But some of the terms you can actually look up as you read – DROWNING METHOD, for example, shows up in the text on page 10, but it isn’t defined until page 94.
That was a good summer.
Okay, here it is after the jump (and I understand if you make fun of me):
Mean Monday: Acclaim for New Delta Review
Because I like to punish myself, I put aside this book review I’m working on to check out once again the Literary Rejections on Display blog and found this post about New Delta Review. Apparently, NDR uses this form letter:
For those with bad eyes, the rejection says:
Thank you for submitting. Unfortunately, the work you sent us is quite terrible. Please forgive the form rejection, but it would take too much of my time to tell you exactly how terrible it was. So again, sorry for the form letter.
Please let this be real. Please. I want this to be real so badly.
Already, someone in the comments section has advised NDR to hire a security guard, because someone might spray-paint their office and take a baseball bat to their car(s).
I have emailed the staff at NDR for confirmation of the form rejection.
*UPDATE*
Here are the emails I exchanged with the editor:
Hey Editors,
I just read somewhere online that you have a rejection form letter that says something like this:
“Thank you for submitting. Unfortunately, the work you sent us is quite terrible. Please forgive the form rejection, but it would take too much of my time to tell you exactly how terrible it was. So again, sorry for the form letter.”
Can you confirm this? I’d rather not waste my or your time submitting something to be rejected just to find out. But I really like the form letter, if this is true. It is funny.
Is it true?
Good work, everyone. Really. I don’t mean this sarcastically.
Thanks,
Ryan
And NDR‘s response:
Ryan,
I responded on the blog to the inquiry. Yes, the rejection in real, in that it came off of our computer and follows the basic template of our form rejection (and was sent out by a particularly wise-ass editor on our staff), but it is not our usual rejection. However, if I received that rejection, I would totally frame it. People take this business way too seriously – rejections are handed out for a million reasons, the first 900,000 of them being personal taste. But you know all this. Glad it gave you a laugh! Submit your work anyway!-Benjamin S. LowenkronEditor-in-Chief
So it is true, but halfway. It’s not their standard form rejection.
*UPDATE UPDATE*
The current editor and then the ‘assmunch’ who originally perpetrated this crime have both posted comments at LROD to explain the situation.
Let the feeding frenzy begin.
Uncategorized / 14 Comments
October 20th, 2008 / 12:57 pm
October 20th, 2008 / 12:57 pm
Mean Week vs Puppies and Rainbows Week
Darby Larson has posted about Mean Week over at his blog. I like Darby. He is good at arguing things, and he thinks hard about things. Many of his comments on blogs are very thoughtful, and I usually read them and think I should make my brain smarter in order to respond to them.
Darby on Mean Week:
I don’t think mean week has been mean, by my definition of it. The problem is that if it were mean, then there would be consequences. Friendships would end, would have to be mended over time, would depend on a puppies and rainbows week just to heal.
Maybe we could learn a thing or too from Gridskipper, a travel blog, that had its own Mean Week back in 2007. Apparently, they traveled places and were mean to babies.
Where is everyone?
Remember When VQR Did This?
That is the first picture to come up if you Google image ‘fuck VQR.’
I have no idea if this is a dumb post or not. And I have no reason to post this, really, except that I like the idea that it will be out there on the internet as a record of VQR‘s momentary stupidity/craziness/awesomeness(?). I stole the information from the guy who runs Literary Rejections on Display, a blog that makes me feel weird.
Ok, so near the end of April, VQR made public on its blog a series of comments that submissions readers had made about certain awful stories, poems, essays in the to-read pile. Then people got mad. Feelings were hurt. Passionate speeches were made. And VQR took down the ‘hurtful’ things and replaced them with kind things. Well, the bandage didn’t work very well, so VQR took those kind things down and replaced them with a letter of apology (sort of?) from editor Ted Genoways.
This is what was originally posted on the blog:
Since I often get a laugh out of reading through some of the notes that our beleaguered readers provide for these particularly unfortunate submissions, it seems worthwhile to share them. Here are some of my favorites:
- The emotional problems of clipping fingernails. Actually the best of his submissions.
- OK, I’m just going to say it. This writing is plain ugly.
- “Soon he fitted his body into mine like a puzzle piece.” NONONONONONONONONO!
- Planet of the Apes fan-fiction! Have we no standards?
- Why does the speaker’s wife only want babies from Chinese shacks? This is the craziest poem. And the scariest. I feel like we should the call the cops on this guy. (There should be a category called “Inappropriate to Humanity.”)
- Unpublished Faulkner. Should remain unpublished.
- I can’t enumerate all the ways in which this is horrible
- This guy has either the best or the worst cover letter ever. As for the poem, barf-o.
The problem with these reader comments is that they aren’t mean enough. And they aren’t that funny, to me anyhow. The fact that VQR posted them is funny, I think.
Okay, the fingernail one makes me laugh a little. I want to read that poem/story.
I know I’m supposed to talk about small presses and online indie stuff. And it is still technically Mean Week, I guess, so I should be mean to VQR somehow. But I am bad at mean. All I really wish is that VQR would do something like this again, so hits rise. Then maybe more people would know about them, like Gawker:
And, finally: What the fuck is The Virginia Quarterly Review?
That is all.
Uncategorized / 8 Comments
October 17th, 2008 / 6:47 pm
October 17th, 2008 / 6:47 pm
John Gardner Bitch Slap
I planned to keep quiet about this, maybe ignore it until some other posts pushed it into the archives, but after a few days, I still couldn’t stop worrying about it. Also, I knew Blake Butler wouldn’t leave me alone until I said something mean for Mean Week, so here’s a shot.
Recently, this guy talked some clever shit in the comments section on my post about new poetry journal Rooms Outlast Us. He said something like how HTMLGIANT and the people who write for it have some moral obligation to keep an eye on small presses so that all those struggling poets out there are treated fairly. He said:
The people who publish Rooms Outlast Us might be righteous people but the chapbook contest they are running is bad karma and hopefully until they change their guidelines no one will send manuscripts for possible publication. A twentry dollar entry fee for essentially nothing is way bad and everyone who enters should feel like they’ve been screwed under the current guidelines. At the very least they should give everyone who enters a one year subscription to their ‘zine. The winner should at least get a token 100 or 200 dollar prize for winning. Otherwise it ain’t legit. And is a waste of everyone’s hard earned money.
After I suggested he email them to ask for specifics and reasons behind the contest guidelines, he lamed out:
It would be nice if they listened to little-old-nobody me. I like to think others are in agreement with me. I mean, they have a 200 copy print run. If you are the winner unless you are shane jones, blake butler, tao lin or one of the other superstars of indie lit it’s not likely you are going to sell that many. In the meantime, the losers who are footing the bill for the winner’s chapbook (and maybe a few Happy meals for the publishers) are getting nothing for their selfless contribution. And being HTML GIANT is now the hub of indie lit info they should feel slightly obliged (morally) to post about it. I mean, as nice as posts with tits in it are nice to have lets counterbalance that with helping out less knowledgable writers and holding small presses accountable for questionable practices that are a miniscule cut above vanity presses.
Now, I’m sure Christopher Robbins is a nice guy. He knows his stuff. He’s linked his blog to lots of indie lit ‘superstars,’ which is step one to becoming famous, I think. He drinks beer and has a goatee. He’s down with other people’s poetry. And he kind of looks like Tom Green, which is awesome. Seriously. I am being serious here. And I hope he doesn’t want to murder me after this, because, really, I don’t feel personal hatred towards him. I don’t even know who he is?
But, on this whole matter, I have to respectfully say that he’s full of shit.
Here’s why:
Uncategorized / 64 Comments
October 15th, 2008 / 1:30 am
October 15th, 2008 / 1:30 am
Chapbook Publishers E-Panel at EWN
Dan Wickett is getting it done over at the Emerging Writers Network.
He’s just posted a great Chapbook E-Panel, participants in which include Kevin Sampsell of Future Tense Press, Ander Monson of New Michigan Press, C.M. Mayo of Tameme, Kristy Bowen of Dancing Girl Press, Carl Annarummo of Greying Ghost Press, and Justin Marks of Kitchen Press.
It’s a lengthy post, but worth the read. Dan asks the particpants questions about the history of each small press, production details (business and design), submissions policies, the chapbook as a form, etc.
New Poetry Journal – Rooms Outlast Us
Rooms Outlast Us is a new poetry journal run by a couple of people I worked with back when I edited fiction at Phoebe. Earlier today, I emailed/gchatted with one of the editors, Danika Stegeman, about it, and she said the journal is modeled after some of the smaller poetry zines that were out in the 50s, 60s, 70s, like the Evergreen Review, which was originally published by Grove Press (before the journal moved online in the 90s, I guess).
Here’s what she said officially:
Rooms Outlast Us will be a small print journal, approximately 40 pages per issue, and will include poetry and poetic criticism. Our emphasis is on showcasing writing from more established poets alongside emerging poets. We are hoping to accommodate writers working on longer works and sequences as well (so the journal will generally favor fewer poets with more pages per poet, rather than many poets with fewer pages). The first issue will be coming out in early January and the journal will be published bi-annually after that.
Rumor has it that they’ve got Matthew Savoca and Laura Sims to contribute to the first issue.
Submissions should be sent to roomsoutlastus[at]gmail.com.
Editors: Danika Stegeman, Ethan Edwards, and Justin Kielsgard.
Burnside Review Fiction Chapbook Contest
I just received the latest winning chapbook from Burnside Review. It is called Superstitions of Apartment Life by Pedro Ponce. The chapbook appears to be a glossary of sorts documenting different things related to apartments. It has been ‘compiled from original sources.’ I’m now in the ‘D’ section. I am enjoying it so far.
Here is an entry from the ‘A’ section.
Augury – Every child is an augur, scrying cracked ceilings from sickbeds, reading figures that emerge backlit from drawn curtains. Language and habit have yet to spackle over the strangeness within carpet tufts, the intricate stitching of shoes. As apartment dwellers, we relive our apprenticeship, pausing at constellated plaster and the runes etched in cobwebs overhead.
Sid Miller is now running the next fiction chapbook contest and is accepting submissions until December 31st. $200 and 25 copies to the winner. Charles D’Ambrosio is judging.