There, have another conversation topic...

[anghara]

Rejections, they gotta hurt. But soemtimes you go beyond the "it didn't grab me" line into serious "HUH?!?" territory.

So what's the weirdest rejection you ever got? Mine... well, I accompanied a friend of mine to a romance writers conference back in FLorida, years ago now. Not quite the kind of stuff I wrote, but SHE did, and hey, it was a girls' weekend away, you can't beat that. So, I went, and seeing as I was there I did what the rest of the conference goers did.

Including join a sort of "meet the agents" afternoon, where groups of six or so people were flung at attending agents and the agent listened to informal pitches from the audience, as it were.

So I said a few things about my work, and got invited to send in a MS to said agent. Which I did - if an agent invites you to send a MS you do it (back then I was still not with my own inimitable current agent, and I was free as a bird... and unrepresented...)

The letter that came back was my own letter to her, on which, in the margins, she had handwritten something along the lines of, "Thank you for sending your manuscript, however, I am afraid I must decline to represent you since I am entering a seminary in two weeks".

(was it something I said...?)

I should have kept that letter. I really should have. I lost it somewhere in the move, but I seriously doubt I'll ever get another quite like it.

Comments

[mindyklasky.livejournal.com]

Ha! No seminary goers for me...

I think that the strangest reject that I ever got was from Marion Zimmer Bradley. I had sent her a very fluffy comic story - a piece that I feared might be too frothy for her, but I *knew* it was too light for any of the other biggies.

I got back a form rejection letter with one of MZB's classic sarcastic rejections. I don't remember the precise wording, but it added up to: "Why bother sending me this? Why not just rent a hall and preach your message from the dais?"

The only thing that I can figure is that the envelope-stuffer accidentally grabbed one from rejection pile X instead of rejection pile Y... I was very offended, at the time, that a form letter was so bitingly sarcastic, but I've gotten over that with time :-)

[oneminutemonkey.livejournal.com]

Ah, MZB. I miss her rejection letters. They keep me so annoyed during my high school days, when I'd submit fairly regularly.
The one that has ALWAYS stuck with me was "I couldn't care less if your characters lived happily ever after, or died in a convenient earthquake on the last page."

[hrj.livejournal.com]

Not that I'm defending her approach, but one of the major logistical problems with MZB's canned rejection notes is that the manuscript cover sheet had shorthand versions of the top 20 canned rejection reasons (e.g., "preachy", "convenient earthquake") but the rejection letters themselves had a much more detailed version of the explanation. One problem that evolved was that the conceptual space covered by the shorthand wasn't a precise match for the conceptual space covered by the detailed text. The rejection notes themselves were automatically generated (text merge plus any non-canned comments typed in by secretary) and there wasn't really a reality-check review where the resulting letter was compared to the story. As time passed, I think MZB's application of the shorthand reasons shifted significantly, since she wasn't actually looking at the full text. Of course, there's also the problem that her mind was going towards the end ....

My strangest rejection letter was for a lesbian historic romance set in 1st century Britain. One of the standard lesbian publishers sent a detailed checklist rejection (seriously -- an actual checklist) that, in addition to a number of random technical issues being checked, had a hand-written note indicating that they considered the story historically inaccurate. Now, I'll give you that anyone writing a lesbian historic romance with a happy ending is likely to be violating known history, but I got as far as drafting an icy return letter listing my 10-page research bibliography and asking which items they considered problematic before I got it out of my system. (No, I never intended to send the letter -- I just needed to have written it. I was actually grateful for the "historically inaccurate" comment because it allowed me to dismiss the rest of the rejection reasons as well.

[mindyklasky.livejournal.com]

Ah... the therapy of the unsent letter... I have indulged in it *many* times! (Many times, in fact, in the past week, when I've been traveling on business and juggling some unpleasant day-job realities!)

Sorry for the late reply, but I *was* intrigued by your MZB and other-rejection stories!

[ramblin-phyl.livejournal.com]

My most irritating rejection was for a short story. I'd submitted to the magazine before and heard within 30 days. So when 6 months went by with no word I wrote a polite note requesting the status. Got back a barely readable scrawl on my letter. "We think it's lost. You can resubmit if you want." NO signature, no date. Nada. I didn't resubmit. About a year later I got the first page of the story back in my SASE with a formal rejection. Guess they found the story eventuallyl.

[eneit.livejournal.com]

weirdest rejection I ever recieved was for a story I hadn't written, by a magazine I'd never submitted to. How they got my name and adress details was beyond me, but it puzzled the receptionist I spoke to even more, as the actual author's name and address was printed on both letter and mss then addressed to me underneath their name and address.

We did eventually get it back to the rightful owner lol

[julesjones]

I think my weirdest one was the one where I discovered that a) "all sexual orientations of characters welcome" was code for "except the one not to our taste, which happens to be one that is of interest to a great many women"; b) "Jules" will be assumed by an American editor to be male.

It wasn't just a), but the attitude that went with it that I was either stupid or being deliberately offensive for failing to understand that "all orientations welcome" did not actually mean that.

[tropic-dm.livejournal.com]

Which begs the question - why did they bother to ask you to send in the MS anyway?

I haven't had a weird rejection yet, but I did get an intriguing one from a woman's magazine which regularly has short stories in it, saying sorry we don't print short stories.

Huh?!