This happened a few years back, but I don't think I ever shared it here and I think it might be interesting or help people dealing with rejection.
I'd been shopping around a short horror story for a while, and one morning opened up my inbox to find two responses waiting for me.
The first e-mail was from a magazine that didn't have a maximum word count listed on their website. I thought it looked good so decided to submit, anyway, and hope for the best. The editor there said he loved it. It was a masterpiece of fiction, and he even compared me to Edgar Allen Poe. Unfortunately, he couldn't publish it because their maximum word count was 3.5k, and my story came in close to 5k, but he thanked me for giving him the opportunity to read it and said I'd have no trouble placing such a fantastic story elsewhere.
Then I opened up the second e-mail. Though the editor was tactful, his response basically translated to "this is the most boring piece of garbage I've ever read, and I can't believe you wasted my time by sending it." This was followed by a suggestion to do a lot more reading so I could learn how to tell a story properly.
The responses were such polar opposites, they didn't make sense to me at first. I had to re-read each e-mail several times, and even went into my sent items and found the original message, just to be absolutely sure I hadn't sent them two different stories by accident. But it ended up being a fantastic lesson. No matter what, there will always be someone out there who thinks what you do is garbage, but that doesn't mean there won't be others who will love what you do.
I'd been shopping around a short horror story for a while, and one morning opened up my inbox to find two responses waiting for me.
The first e-mail was from a magazine that didn't have a maximum word count listed on their website. I thought it looked good so decided to submit, anyway, and hope for the best. The editor there said he loved it. It was a masterpiece of fiction, and he even compared me to Edgar Allen Poe. Unfortunately, he couldn't publish it because their maximum word count was 3.5k, and my story came in close to 5k, but he thanked me for giving him the opportunity to read it and said I'd have no trouble placing such a fantastic story elsewhere.
Then I opened up the second e-mail. Though the editor was tactful, his response basically translated to "this is the most boring piece of garbage I've ever read, and I can't believe you wasted my time by sending it." This was followed by a suggestion to do a lot more reading so I could learn how to tell a story properly.
The responses were such polar opposites, they didn't make sense to me at first. I had to re-read each e-mail several times, and even went into my sent items and found the original message, just to be absolutely sure I hadn't sent them two different stories by accident. But it ended up being a fantastic lesson. No matter what, there will always be someone out there who thinks what you do is garbage, but that doesn't mean there won't be others who will love what you do.
