Longest, shortest, oddest, nicest...?

I'm am impatient person, not a good trait for the freelancing biz, and I hate waiting 3 months! LOL!

I sent an equery to an agent around 10pm on a Sunday night. A nice little form rejection arrived precisely nine and a half hours later, Monday morning.

Sadly I have no acceptance stories.

About three years ago I started chatting to someone in a Yahoo writers group. I gave her a brief run down on the novel I was working on at the time, and she seemed to quite like the basic premise. She also turned out to be the chief editor of a small publisher in Australia. Anyway, she offered to have a look at the book once I'd finished it.

Thirty rejection letters later, I sent her a copy of the MS, but didn't really think anything would come of it. She read it and then handed it on to the publisher, who liked it and sent me a contract to sign a couple of days later. Just prior to all this, I'd come really close to chucking in the whole writing thing. Then a few weeks later I received two more offers from another couple of publishers.

Nowadays I'm not really bothered by rejection, because I know acceptance can be waiting just round the corner.

I saw an announcement here for real estate stories, wrote mine in 20 minutes, sent it in, got an acceptance in another 30 minutes and am looking for the $100 check. Gotta be a record, at least for me!

My quickest rejection was from an online zine I had been in before. Within 10 minutes of submission I got: "Thanks, Kate, but I think you meant this to go somewhere else." It was a nice rejection!

I had an editor tell me to stop watching so much TV

piscesgirl80 said:

There have been some interesting stories in the Goals and Accomplishments and the Rejection and Dejection forums about particularly long or short response times, or strange responses from agents or editors, so I'm curious as to what unusual experiences people might have had.

I'm having an essay appearing in an anthology about 4 years after it was initially accepted, which I think is on the long side, as from what I understand the turnaround for this sort of project tends to be more like a year or two. (There weren't any revisions or anything.)

Ok, so my own contribution to this thread is not terribly interesting, but it's all I've got.

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I had an editor tell me to stop watching so much TV.
I think he was insane. He also told me to "...redline your brain..." Now isn't "redlining" the practice where a bank refuses to make loans in certain "inner city" areas? How would I transfer this banking practice to my own dealings with my own brain? And if -- by some metaphorical miracle -- I did, what discernable effect would it have on my writing?

After that experience I decided to stop writing short stories since if I had to read the same amount of insane crap from editors per work, it was more cost-effective to write novels since the proportion of editorial insanity per page of my writing was sure to be much lower.

I also watch as much TV as I can and if my brain wants something, I see if I can get it....so maybe insane editors are more helpful than you would think.