Slack is good for young writers.
I received my very first rejection from the
Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and I was too embarrassed through the years to tell the details. In my teens, I was already seriously addicted to its stories, serials, and features by the great atheistic god, Issac Asimov, to “Through Space and Time with Ferdinand Feghoot."
I worked the summer of 1958 as an assistant sheepherder in the mountains just north of Yellowstone Park, my mind full of the real wolves there. The story, with characters having unpronounceable growls as names was full of borrowed werewolf tropes, and sent off misspelled and hand-printed on every other line of college ruled paper. I remember thinking “college ruled” would imply a degree of sophistication.
Boucher was gone, and there were several editors through the ‘58. No one signed my rejection letter which was waiting for me down the mountain when school started. It seemed to regret my story just wasn’t
quite right for
F&SF at that time; however, someone admired my printing so much as to compliment it, then suggest future submissions should be typewritten.
