I had worked the damn story to the point where, if I had read it to my wife one more time, she was going to sever my larynx while I slept. You want to talk about workshopping a piece before you submit it? I reviewed a dozen stories a day, hoping for some useful advice, something I could do to shore up my characters or bolt the plot harder to the deck. Twenty-seven revisions, twenty-seven freakin' revisions! If Moses had taken the Ten Commandments through that much nitpicking he'd 'a cut it down to one triple-word construct - Thou Shalt Not - and submitted it to the masses. And when I was certain in my heart that there was nothing left to change, no possible plot hole left unfilled, no typos, punctuation errors, or inadvertently omitted words, I emailed the gem to the one magazine I'd specifically written it for, the one I'd been trying to get published in for over five years.
It took them four hours and thirty-one minutes to reject it.
Now, first of all, you have to understand their website alerts writers to a four to six month response time; patience, they remind us, is a virtuous avocation (in other words, don't call us until three days after Hell freezes over.) They claim to receive thousands of submissions a month and with the current economic crisis, two of their five editors have sought employment where a paycheck rather than a copy of the magazine is handed out on Friday afternoon. So when they tossed the most brilliant piece of literary prose to come from my keyboard in four hours and thirty-one minutes, I couldn't help but think it was a mistake.
I replied to the electronic rejection slip:
"Gentlemen or Ladies, as the case may be, I believe there's been a mistake. Perhaps I've overlooked something in your guidelines or possibly an electronic glitch in the file you received. I am resubmitting my story as an attachment to this email in .RTF rather than .DOC format, which your guidelines say was acceptable.
Thanks for giving me the opportunity to submit; I look forward to good news in a few months from you."
With that, I shutdown the laptop and went to the beach; shit, I'd earned it.
***
In the three hours I'd been gone, I'd developed a magnificent character in my head: a hybrid of WC Fields, Donald Trump, and Captain Kangaroo. All I needed was a plot and I could start writing. My wife had gone out to play mah jong with her cronies and for the balance of the afternoon, I had the quiet of the lanai, a tasty bottle of single malt, and a cool breeze to keep me company. I booted the portable, pouring myself a bit more than a dram, while it rolled through its always-too-long wakeup routine. Diligent as I am about such things, anal if you ask my wife, I checked for new email before starting the new piece.
Had I waited ten minutes longer before leaving for the beach, I would have read their response while it was still fresh. Yet three hours later, revived from the deep freeze of some distant server, the words instantly turned the pleasures of the whiskey into vinegar.
"There was no mistake; your story is not the sort of thing or the level of quality we're looking for. Best of luck placing it in some lesser journal.
Passionately yours,
The Editorial Staff"
The Editorial Staff, which one? Which of the three remaining editors had the time to read my five grand worth of words ahead of the other 999 stories they'd already received that month? Which one of these assholes was ramming his editorial staff up my keester with this bullet-train review process?
I finished the scotch in a single gulp and spit off this reply:
"Dear Editorial Staff - I have been reading your magazine for more than five years. I have been writing for twice that time and have had stories published in many journals equivalent in quality to yours. Truthfully, some have been better, but yours is the one I've always felt deserved a piece by me. The story I've once again attached to this email is the result of twenty-seven revisions and reviews by some of the finest writers in the world today. Please take a moment and give me some clue as to why you've rejected it and why it was done so quickly. Thanks."
I clicked Send and refueled my glass. My email program is designed to check for new messages every five minutes. I selected the Settings tab and changed it to three.
While the clock in the lower corner of my screen ticked off the minutes, I opened the story in Word and printed a copy. Maybe there was something deep in the story I couldn't see, some fatal error that I'd overlooked. The email probed for business three times while I read and when I was done, there was nothing I could imagine changing, nothing that looked askance. I clicked the Check Email button, watching as several new messages were sucked onto my screen.
The first four were spam that had managed to evade my usually reliable filter; I deleted them without reading. The fifth was from my wife, sent on her iPhone (a gadget I couldn't possibly understand and which she normally left in the car) reminding me to take the steaks out of the freezer lest we eat tuna fish again tonight. I shook my head and deleted the message, she'd left the steaks in a throwaway pan on the counter before heading out.
The fifth message was from The Editorial Staff:
"You wasted that much time on this drivel? What does that tell you about your prospects as a writer?
Passionately yours,
The Editorial Staff"
Whoa, this was getting way beyond professional now. Hey buddy, let's see some of your writing, okay? Let's see what your qualifications are to sit in judgment over me. How about your real name for starters? I was about to pen a response to this butt plug but went to the browser instead. My online writing group had most certainly submitted to this magazine; it was time to out this offensive chap.
I skipped the WriteMails and notices of new reviews and went straight to the Open Forum to post the following:
"What would you say to this sort of rejection letter and the subsequent responses?"
I copied and pasted all the emails into the post, removing the magazine's name and the title to my story. The last part proved unnecessary as just about everyone online had read the piece at least twice and knew exactly which story I was referring to.
The thread grew to a hundred posts in less than an hour, an hour that I had forced myself not to check email. All of them followed a basic outline of shock, horror, dismay, and outright embarrassment that such a prestigious magazine could have such a caustic editor. However, there was not one post from anyone who had received such treatment from that same journal. A few posts mentioned other magazines, both printed and electronic, that had been terse or simply mechanical in their rejections, but none that been as outright rude as mine. I savored another dram of the single malt, feeling somewhat relieved that the rest of the world was on my side.
With my army of supporters patting my back and urging me to strike out, I switched from browser to email, fully prepared to take this bastard on headfirst. It took four revisions of my email before I hit Send:
"Dear Passionate Editorial Staff - I'm curious. What can you offer in terms of your own writings that I may understand your qualifications? I've been a writer for ten years, how long have you been in the trade? And wouldn't it make more sense for you, assuming you've a level of experience at least equal to mine, to offer positive criticism rather than degrading remarks? I've discussed your emails with my online writing group, one that I'm certain you're aware of - WriteRead - and everyone is as puzzled as I am in trying to understand how such a superb magazine would have an editorial staff that treated writers in this manner. I passionately await your reply."
I reset the automatic check mail feature to five minutes and went into the kitchen to season the steaks and throw them in the refrigerator. There was a bottle of white wine, still room temperature, having resided in the wine rack for several months, squeezed into the door between the milk and the orange juice. I pulled it out and laid it on a shelf next to the bag of celery; twenty years together and she still couldn't get the red and white thing squared away. An '02 Bordeaux was more appropriate for tonight; I stood the bottle in the shaded corner of the countertop and set a pair of the large wineglasses next to it. She loved to uncork the bottles with some electrical gadget from Bed, Bath, and Things, one of our primary vendors, right up there with the phone company and the tax assessor, and woe be it to the husband or dinner guest who denied her that pleasure.
My preliminary kitchen chores complete, I returned to the lanai and awakened the screen; the third message down was the one I was waiting for:
"You complained about our magazine on WriteRead? What, you didn't think we'd find out? You little shit. It's a good thing we tossed your story in the rubbish bin. You probably would have complained if it were the second story in an issue instead of the lead. You can tell all your little writing friends that we know what's going on at their websites. We have people salted into all the Discussion boards at all the writing workshops online. Complain about us and retribution will be swift and final. Don't bother submitting anything else to us; your name is now permanently ensconced in a list of undesirables.
Passionately yours,
The Editorial Staff"
The Wicked Witch of the West replaced Captain Kangaroo in my potential new character and any concept of a plot that may have been brewing in my mind was discarded in anger. With my fingers poised over the keyboard, ready to sling electronic spears through the ether toward this jerk, I paused and re-read the line about having spies in the workshop.
We have people salted into all the Discussion boards at all the writing workshops online.
That just didn't seem plausible. What, did every highly regarded magazine monitor the vox populi? If so, did they adjust to the comments or recoil in fear? Was Big Brother really watching or was this editor full of crap? And why would this knowledge be revealed to me now, and why only me?
Even more important though, was getting this news in the hands of everyone else on WriteRead. My God, there had been all sorts of threads over the past five years that cast aspersions on certain magazines; who knew how much damage we were foisting on our careers by speaking our minds? I had to alert my friends...
...assuming they were my friends.
I dropped my hands into my lap and stared out at the lake in the distance. How would I know? I mean, how many reviews had I received that may have been bogus? How much advice had I blindly accepted, modifying my stories based on what appeared to be the sage pronouncements of writers who I had accepted as mentors? Who were the editorial operatives disguised by false screen personalities, doling out misinformation that kept good writers, nay, excellent writers from reaching those gold rings on the merry-go-round of literary fame?
Even with the drift of air conditioning and the artificial wind of the ceiling fan above me, I began to sweat, my fingers reaching for the mouse and falling away as the fear of reprisal and its subsequent demolition of my publishing prospects refused to let me click. The possibility of taking the entire WriteRead community down loomed in the forefront of my consciousness as though a darkening sky was bringing destruction in hundred-mile-an-hour winds and flooding rains.
Forcing myself to a modicum of calm, I held a long breath, and was about to slide the mouse over the browser icon when an email blipped onto the screen. Next to the sender's name was a red exclamation point, the symbol of urgency in an electronic hail of messages. The sender was the magazine, my adversary, who had unleashed the hounds of Hell upon what was to have been my day of glory and relief. I opened the missive and leaned in toward the screen so as not to miss a single pixel of what was displayed:
"To our most valued writers - Apparently a rogue editor, one who recently left our employ, had set a trap to waylay incoming emails to his personal computer. Several of you may have received rejections from this person in error today. Rest assured that these did not originate from us, the trap has been sealed, and while we regret any inconvenience, this is just another one of the foibles of the digital age. Unfortunately, this former employee was also able to delete all existing submissions and we ask that you resubmit any story that has not be accepted or rejected by our editorial staff. We thank you for you support in the past and look forward to reading your work.
Passionately yours,
The Editorial Staff"
The rest of Ricky's website.