When burning bridges isn't enough, use TNT

Seems to me something is trying to tell you not to bother with that place......

Is your real name Murphy?

Did they only take .doc or something?

It happens to everyone. I get so many submissions from authors seeking representation it's not even funny. (Didn't change their cover letters to publisher queries)

But, anyone in the business knows how easy it is for that to happen. If someone is an asshat to you b/c of an honest mistake, then you probably don't want to be working with them anyway.

Maybe you should wait and see if she contacts you. You never know.....

From the headline, I thought this was going to be a link to a story about an oh-no-you-didn't public over-the-line temper-tantrum.

I hardly think a simple mistake like this is going to get you permanently blacklisted .

The Lonely One said:

I'd copied and pasted my cover letter from another submission and LEFT THE NAME OF THE WRONG JOURNAL IN THE HEADING.

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This happens all the time. You aren't the first and won't be the last.

It happens.

About seven years ago a director and I went into a meeting as a team to talk with an actor about an idea he had for a film. He gave us a treatment. The idea was poorly developed, and the character the actor had written for himself was ridiculous in his perfection, but there was enough there that I thought I could pull a script out of it. I rewrote the treatment from scratch, stupidly including a parenthetical comment that went something like

(I've kept JOE as perfect as I can stomach since it's ______'s project, and he clearly doesn't want to play someone with so much as a single fucking flaw)

and sent it off to my director friend. He liked the treatment, and, without deleting the parenthetical phrase, forwarded it on to the actor.

Anyway, didn't get that job.

Ouch!

Nobody there will remember that you messed up your last submission when you send your next submission, I promise. Tech glitches are super common.

What people do remember is when people act like jerks, not when they make mistakes.

The Lonely One said:

So I'm having a bad day.

Got a nice little rejection in the e-mail box today (that isn't the bad part, stay tuned).

Immediately sent the story out to another rather large journal. Then I realized, while reformatting the story to .doc it made half the story a different font and completely screwed up the page number formatting (did I mention how much I hate the standardization of MSWord?).

I sent another email to the editor, apologizing for the formatting mistake and this time sending the story in email-format with the appropriate line-breaks etc.

Just rechecked my initial email to the editor on a niggling hunch, and guess what? I'd copied and pasted my cover letter from another submission and LEFT THE NAME OF THE WRONG JOURNAL IN THE HEADING.

I'm not going to bother this poor woman with another email. I'll just take my with-prejudice rejection and slink away.

How bad can one writer screw up a relationship with a journal, seriously?

Please share some stories and make me feel better

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Actually, I did something very similar once. Queried two travel magazines, competitors, of course, and managed to send the email meant to go out to magazine A to the editor of magazine B.

The editor of magazine B replied more or less immediately, letting me know that, hey, butthead, we are magazine B and not magazine A, how stupid of you, but thanks for emailing anyway. Oh boy. So I DID send her another email, also immediately, wrote something along the lines of "Hahaha, I just discussed 'most embarrassing moments ever' with a bunch of other freelancers, and I think this could easily top the list. So if you're not completely offended by my most embarrassing moment ever, I would love to send you the email with those other queries that were actually meant for you and your magazine. Pretty please?"

To my surprise, she said "ok," I send a new query letter, and she actually gave me an assignment.

Sooo - you've got nothing to lose. By now, the editor probably thinks you're one nut short of a muesli - so make that work to your advantage. You can't make it worse anyway. Go in there, send a creative, yet sweet email to explain yourself and THEN start expecting to never hear back. And, who knows, maybe you will. It's not about the mistakes we make. It's about how we deal with those mistakes. And if you're showing some humble greatness and creativity now, you might just enter this editor's awareness.

My main concern with sending a THIRD email would be that I'd now be bordering annoying.

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Yeah, give 'em a few months to forget it ever happened.

I came in here,expecting some good tea to be spilled,lol.

It happens to everyone. I once sent a query to an agent with the sweet greeting of "Dear Agent,Whose Soul Shall Be Mine". I expect they don't want any more queries from me.

Until you can top that,you are okay!

Welcome to the club, TLO. I think I'm an honorary elder. Just send them your next (better) story.

Unless you included some juicy personal insults in your material, she'll have forgotten your name before she gets through her email. No reason not to sub to this journal again, correctly.

Been there, done that. More than once, actually... It generally happens to me from an overzealous use of the copy and paste functions.

• Tweak form query for Magazine A.
• Ctrl-A to select all, Ctrl-C to copy.
• Move to e-mail, Ctrl-V to paste.
• Send e-mail to Magazine A.
• Tweak form query again.
• Ctrl-A to select all, don't press Ctrl-C hard enough for it to pick up the new selected text.
• Move to e-mail, Ctrl-V, pasting in duplicate of form letter designed for Magazine A that was still on the clipboard.
• Send e-mail to Magazine B

Took me a couple times to learn, but I'm very careful to triple check the names before hitting the send button.

You made me laugh. Never mind. Worse things happen at sea, so they say.

The Lonely One said:

How bad can one writer screw up a relationship with a journal, seriously?

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I once accidently sent a query with the subject line 'where were you this morning asswipe?'

TIP: Don't email friends while emailing queries. it's easy to get confused