This will be short and sweet and I’m writing inside a Chicago hotel room, it rained and my zoo excursion was delayed by one day.
I received a nondescript, auto-generated rejection for one of my short stories this afternoon. That in and of itself is par for the course, part of the “process” of trying to get writing published, out into the world. Gotta have a thick skin, etc. At least on an intellectual level, xxx many rejections in a row means you have to work some more on your story, fair or unfair. Or attempt to more precisely target places to submit your work.
In any case, I tend to submit to a handful of places at once and then put it completely out of my mind, which I think is healthy.
But I checked and saw that this particular submission was sent five months ago. That is pretty obnoxious.
Now, I am reasonably confident that this submission was not in a backlog for five months. It did not take five months for someone to read this story. No, I strongly believe the writing submission process is darkly similar to the job submission process, which is that your submission gets a look-through (at times, a mere 30-second glance over) and if the reader finds a reason, any reason to stop reading, they will.
But that rather than send out an auto-rejection letter AT THE TIME OF REJECTION, which is what 99 percent of these places have unless they promise feedback, for reasons that are mysterious to me, it gets delayed for an absurd amount of time.
I’m not quite sure what the reason for it is but I gather it’s some combination of the following: the rejection forms are set not to go out until all their accepted pieces are confirmed and the issue is ready; someone responsible for pushing the button forgets for a while then discovers some stories they need to formally reject; or lamest of all, the rejection notice is simply set for a random date into the future to give the pretense of an arduous selection process, even when that didn’t happen.
Why is this wrong or unfair? A couple of reasons. Most people work hard on their stories. I know I do. People aren’t owed publication, they aren’t owed coddling, they aren’t owed feedback (again unless otherwise promised), but they deserve to know of rejections in a timely fashion. Not all pieces are evergreen, particularly essays. Obviously radio silence itself is a pretty good sign a piece was rejected, but that’s only because writers know by now of the gap between when a piece was read/rejected and when an e-mail is sent out.
More egregious, many publications STILL demand “non-simultaneous submissions” and then have the gall to delay notice of rejection. The latter is a insistence on the writer only sending out their work to one outlet at a time; I think some places can check, possibly through Submittable or whatever agreements they have with other publications. Some can’t and their demand is completely empty, which is somehow more outrageous.
It’s abusive. And from reading a handful of blogs by writers, nobody really follows it, which makes it even worse. The low rate of acceptance is such is that there’s rarely a time when a piece is accepted by multiple outlets such that you have to pull it back from somewhere, and if it happens, and an outlet tries to pull the non-simultaneous submission card, well, burn that bridge to the fucking ground, if they don’t do it for you.
And then there’s reading fees.
These dupes who stipulate rules that hurt writers or create a dramatically unequal atmosphere where writers are expected to delicately tailor submissions to specific places or give them money, but can then be completely ghosted for months, if they ever hear a response at all. A handful of these outlets are only hurting themselves, turning off both writers and readers, shorting their own capacity to produce meaningful content, and online or offline publications are not exactly thriving these days.
But I’m also complaining about this because this isn’t just a process endemic to creative writing. This kind of one-way street down a black hole occurs in far more important things such as job hunting as well.
The online structures themselves have become a problem for people. I don’t know what the solution is! But people experience these frustrations, some of them pretty serious, should know they are not alone.
Culture Time 