Hi Everyone,
I'm not sobbing though I am here to share rejection--the nicest one of my entire writing career. I have been extremely dizzy lately. The return of my vertigo and tinnitus makes me unable to write/revise properly, so I submitted out a couple shorts that I had written just as exercises or warmups before the symptoms came back.
This one was to an online reading service most of you have heard of. It doesn't pay much but does pay so it seemed a good match for my first horror submission without breaking the commitment to myself to write only if paid (except book promos). So I wanted to share the bad-goodness.
Dear Lucie Smoker,
Thank you for your submission to (redacted). I regret to inform you that we are unable to use it at this time.
There is a great deal of information in this vignette that captures a history quickly. For this to be a story, though, we need to get deeper into the character and the context. Right now she is just a woman with dishes and a dead man. What are her emotions? What is her personality? Her memories. Her hopes. Help us know her better.
-- (name redacted)
This story has a great voice. Casually gruesome. I especially love how her husband "accidentally" died by choking on a bone she "put" in the meatball and that it was coupled with her smothering him with a couch cushion--excellent little bit of characterization of her and her personality in those few lines. But I have to agree with Jenn, this is really more of a vignette than a complete story. Besides this, stories about spouses killing spouses is a very common plot we see here at (redacted) and it takes something that really puts a fresh spin on it in order to make it to publication.
-- (name redacted)
There is great potential in this. The blending of the mundanity of having to do the dishes with the profundity of committing murder works disturbingly well, bringing out a kind of insanity in the narrator who obsesses over such a small thing in the face of her act. However this also brings a certain humanness to her character, for we realize that she is not truly a murderer, though she has killed her husband. She has killed out of desperation, for the sake of her own freedom, and I think the juxtaposition allows us to understand this.
What I think would improve this piece is if it were a little bit longer, so that the character development could be allowed to flourish a bit more. This woman is interesting. She is complex, yet absolutely simple, and this is what fascinates me. I would like her to be explored. I would also have liked for her husband's cruelty to be explored a bit more, because I didn't feel I got a very strong sense of the kind of oppression the narrator has suffered.
Overall, a well written piece, disturbing and weird, all in the name of pretty decent literature. Well done.
-- (name redacted)
Unfortunately due to the insanely massive amounts of submissions in our slush pile, we cannot reconsider your piece at this time.
We wish you good luck in placing the story elsewhere.
Sincerely,
(redacted)
After this rejection, I feel awesome. There is still kindness and a love of story in this industry,
Lucie
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You are amazing at setting yourself a deadline and sticking to it. A little rest can help get you there. And if you find later that the deadline needs to move a little, that's okay too. I say this as someone who lives on deadlines.