Prestigious literary journals are as efficient as prestigious literary agents. The fiction that I submitted to the Cimarron Review two weeks ago has already been rejected. Talk about efficiency!
The tiny scrap of paper was as much a form as any agent's tiny scrap of paper, about three inches by four inches of heavy bond, printed with the stock rejection phrases. In essence, my short fiction was not quite right for their list, but good luck placing it elsewhere.
But there was an unexpected bonus in the SASE, a special gift just for me. Was it an added form, to ask me to submit something else another time? A little note from the editor? Of course not. This is a business, not a garden party. After rejecting my prose, the good people of the Cimarron Review invited me to subscribe to the very rag that does not want me.
Hardly the ideal client, am I, having been turned down. Someone must be taking a page from Al Zuckerman of Writers House, who is fond of using the writer's SASE to mail out an advert for his own how-to book. As much as I would like to indulge, my finances are precarious at the moment. The cost of submitting eats into the budget, and I'm dependent on the public library for reading material. Unfortunately for the public library, they are dealing with their own budget constraints, and don't subscribe to very many literary journals. The local book vendor does not bother with them either, taking up as much shelf space as they do and they need that space for Quilting News Quarterly and Scantily Clad Females Monthly.
Not to be defeated, I'll print up a few more copies and find some journals that accept manuscripts during the summer months. A form rejection won't stop me. Only death will put an end to my submitting.
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