Rejected again. Damn.

From the rejec­tion letter:

Thank you for sub­mit­ting “Out­side, Look­ing In” to Strange Hori­zons, but we’ve decid­ed not to accept it for pub­li­ca­tion. This is an intrigu­ing and poet­i­cal­ly writ­ten piece; we all liked it (I felt the sto­ry real­ly hit its stride at the point when the pro­tag­o­nist showed up on Earth). But over­all it did­n’t real­ly hold togeth­er for us.

At least they liked it enough to give me pos­i­tive feed­back, and not a “Please quit send­ing us stuff” let­ter like Snoopy always seems to get.

On to the next one. F&SF, probably.

lat­er
Or maybe ASF, or some­thing along those lines. I was think­ing of a dif­fer­ent sto­ry, one that’s more def­i­nite­ly on the Fan­ta­sy side of the cur­tain (“Fim­bul­vetr”, if you’re interested).

3 thoughts on “Rejected again. Damn.

  1. I sent them “My Troll Lover” a cou­ple weeks ago — haven’t heard yet. They’ve always been good to me with regard to com­ments; F&SF, on the oth­er hand, has nev­er giv­en me any­thing but form let­ters on tiny slips of paper half the size of your aver­age ass wipe. My advice on F&SF: first change your name to Kage Bak­er or Robert Reed or Paul Di Fil­lipo. Me no like F&SF.

  2. The one time I sub­mit­ted to them, the response was very rapid (less than a month, IIRC), and the let­ter, while small, was per­son­al­ized. Para­phras­ing from mem­o­ry, it said some­thing about “There’s some good writ­ing here, but I’m afraid it does­n’t quite do it for me”, or words to that effect. It was signed in green ink* by an edi­to­r­i­al assis­tant, not Mr. van Gelder hisself.

    But I think I’m gonna try Asi­mov’s first. See how that goes.

    -pat

    * No, I’m not obses­sive, nor do I have an eidet­ic mem­o­ry. I just was going through my “scrib­blings” fold­er last night, and came across the rejec­tion note, and it struck me as odd that it’d be signed in green.

  3. Sounds like the same bloke who likes to shoot my stuff down. Waspy name like John Philip Thomas John­son III, isn’t it? That’s one of his form letters.

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