Irritating Rejection from TLR
I almost never take rejections personally, no matter how much an editor ignores/praises me. Either way, it's a subjective business. The one thing that
does piss me off, is when a journal makes me wait a year for nothing. You can send me a form rejection after a week + I'll laugh out loud. You can send me a form rejection after three months + I'll nod. You can send me a form rejection after six months + I won't flinch. You can also send me a personalized rejection at
any point between one week + one year + obviously, I won't get angry either. Disappointed + probably mopey, but never angry. But when you make me wait a year for absolutely nothing--
The Literary Journal, I'm talking to you--that pisses me off for a bunch of reasons:
1. The New Yorker + Esquire now only make unknown writers wait for 3-6 months before they find out they still need an agent (+ those journals get at least 24,000 fiction submissions a year, probably more)
2. The Paris Review will send you something usually in the same time-frame with fewer submissions + fewer readers
3. If you're a small, non-glossy, non-glitzy, university or MFA-affiliated literary journal + it's taking you a year to send people form rejections, then you're not dealing with your slushpile effectively at all. Either you don't have enough readers or the managing editor isn't doing her/his job of splitting up the manuscripts or the journal has moved locations (in all three cases, just keep the submission manager offline until you're ready to actually read shit).
I've been a fiction reader for literary journals before + I know this. If your editor in chief misplaces manuscripts, oh, say, in an attic for a year, that's another story. But with online submission managers, stories don't become refugees the way they used to.
Okay, in summary:
The glossies are getting to manuscripts faster than a lot of these small literary journals + they have 20 times as many submissions each month + often not that many more readers. Of course they also have unpaid internships + $$. On the flipside, most MFA students have no desire to read from the slushpile after the buzz has worn off + they start to realize that they have stories to workshop in two weeks + a pile of short stories to (not) read. In any case, I don't give a shit: it's still obnoxious to send responses a year after a submission was sent unless that manuscript made the final round but then was rejected, in which case, it's still kinda obnoxious but the good rejection makes the obnoxiousness kinda go away even though it's also really heart-breaking + feels oh so fucking close.
For all the above reasons, even though I've admired a few of the stories in TLR (specifically, Heidi Durrow's piece), I'm gonna peace out of all future TLR submissions. I just don't have another year of my life to waste + I'm not convinced the wait is worth it. At least when the New Yorker makes you wait a long time--it happens--the rejection hurts less because with your next submission, you still get a smaller-than-life chance to do the impossible + publish one of your stories in the motherfucking New Yorker, which would change your writing career forever.
1. The New Yorker + Esquire now only make unknown writers wait for 3-6 months before they find out they still need an agent (+ those journals get at least 24,000 fiction submissions a year, probably more)
2. The Paris Review will send you something usually in the same time-frame with fewer submissions + fewer readers
3. If you're a small, non-glossy, non-glitzy, university or MFA-affiliated literary journal + it's taking you a year to send people form rejections, then you're not dealing with your slushpile effectively at all. Either you don't have enough readers or the managing editor isn't doing her/his job of splitting up the manuscripts or the journal has moved locations (in all three cases, just keep the submission manager offline until you're ready to actually read shit).
I've been a fiction reader for literary journals before + I know this. If your editor in chief misplaces manuscripts, oh, say, in an attic for a year, that's another story. But with online submission managers, stories don't become refugees the way they used to.
Okay, in summary:
The glossies are getting to manuscripts faster than a lot of these small literary journals + they have 20 times as many submissions each month + often not that many more readers. Of course they also have unpaid internships + $$. On the flipside, most MFA students have no desire to read from the slushpile after the buzz has worn off + they start to realize that they have stories to workshop in two weeks + a pile of short stories to (not) read. In any case, I don't give a shit: it's still obnoxious to send responses a year after a submission was sent unless that manuscript made the final round but then was rejected, in which case, it's still kinda obnoxious but the good rejection makes the obnoxiousness kinda go away even though it's also really heart-breaking + feels oh so fucking close.
For all the above reasons, even though I've admired a few of the stories in TLR (specifically, Heidi Durrow's piece), I'm gonna peace out of all future TLR submissions. I just don't have another year of my life to waste + I'm not convinced the wait is worth it. At least when the New Yorker makes you wait a long time--it happens--the rejection hurts less because with your next submission, you still get a smaller-than-life chance to do the impossible + publish one of your stories in the motherfucking New Yorker, which would change your writing career forever.