Next benchmark is reached!

[annathepiper]

For those of you who might be counting, it is now two entire months since I got back my "yes, we got your manuscript" postcard from Tor. I am still fairly certain that this is heavily related to the recent office move that has gone on there, but hey, I'll take any extra leeway time I can get as I am still slogging my way through the third draft edits.

Next up: to see if I can make it to the end of the year. Because as previously mentioned, a rejection letter for Christmas would suck. Unless it was a funny rejection letter, maybe. For example:

"Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! Your novel is still too wordy."
"Peace on Earth, good will to men, and fewer adjectives to your prose."
"Don't think of this as a lump of coal in your writerly stocking. Think of it as fuel for the fire of--ah, what are we thinking? It's a lump of coal. Happy Holidays!"
"Santa knows when you're dreaming, when you're awake, and when you're working on your novel. Unfortunately, you did not make his Good List this year."
"We do thank you for not spilling any egg nog on your manuscript; however, we recommend drinking a little less of it while writing."
"If you dream of a white Christmas, we respectfully suggest you cut out your extraneous sentences, print them out, and fling them around the yard as snowflake substitutes as we cannot use them."

Comments

[mamishka.livejournal.com]

*giggle* Maybe if this writing thing doesn't work out you can become an editor and write fabulously funny rejection letters. I think that would be pretty great. ;) I would really like to get a funny rejection letter if I have to get a rejection letter at all, y'know? And those ones are way funny! :)

[annathepiper]

Why thank you. ^_^ I can't take credit for the first one, actually--that was spazzkat's! But the rest are mine!

(I'm not sure I'd want to be an editor, though! From what I've learned about what editors actually do, a BIG part of it is running interference between authors and agents and marketing and I think my head would explode if I tried to do that. However, slush pile reader, that I could probably do!)

[gazerwolf.livejournal.com]

Another Rejection letter idea:
"We wish you a Merry Christmas"

"We wish you a Merry Christmas"

"We wish you a Merry Christmas and don't submit this trash again!"
----
(This is no comment on your writing by me I quite enjoyed what I read of your work)

[annathepiper]

*giggle* Ah, but 'don't submit this trash again' loses the entire point of the funny. Too obvious! Hrmm. Perhaps 'why don't you try Daw?' might scan a little better, too. ;)

But thank you. ^_^

[shikyrie.livejournal.com]

::keeping fingers crossed:: ;)

[annathepiper]

Thank you!

[shikyrie.livejournal.com]

much welcome :)

I saw this yesterday and thought of you

[llachglin.livejournal.com]

It's an early rejection letter (http://www.ursulakleguin.com/Reject.html) for Ursula K. LeGuin, sent to her agent.

Quoted in full:

Dear Miss Kidd,

Ursula K. Le Guin writes extremely well, but I’m sorry to have to say that on the basis of that one highly distinguishing quality alone I cannot make you an offer for the novel. The book is so endlessly complicated by details of reference and information, the interim legends become so much of a nuisance despite their relevance, that the very action of the story seems to be to become hopelessly bogged down and the book, eventually, unreadable. The whole is so dry and airless, so lacking in pace, that whatever drama and excitement the novel might have had is entirely dissipated by what does seem, a great deal of the time, to be extraneous material. My thanks nonetheless for having thought of us. The manuscript of The Left Hand of Darkness is returned herewith. Yours sincerely,

The Editor

21 June, 1968

Re: I saw this yesterday and thought of you

[annathepiper]

You thought of me while reading a rejection letter of Ursula K. LeGuin's? Gosh. *^_^* Thanks for the quote!