Oooh - what a grim writing day. Six rejections - SIX! - in one go!!! And all from Woman's Weekly.
Five short stories - all considered to be "too predictable" - and the 12,000 word three-parter that I'd worked on for soooo long.... Sadly they felt the three-parter was "contrived and old-fashioned".... Ouch!
Five short stories - all considered to be "too predictable" - and the 12,000 word three-parter that I'd worked on for soooo long.... Sadly they felt the three-parter was "contrived and old-fashioned".... Ouch!
I've been in this game long enough to know that rejections are all par for the course, but knowing it still doesn't make getting them any easier. I HATE it! It always feels so personal, doesn't it???
Not that I expect everything I write to be accepted - far from it - I'm still without an ounce of confidence, but after writing and selling short stories for most of my life, I was pretty sure I knew how to avoid the "predictable" "contrived" "old-fashioned" pit-falls. Clearly I don't... Sigh...
Must now take my own advice, re-read the short stories, rework them where necessary and send them out again. Which I will do the minute I've stopped swearing and kicking the furniture and sulking. Sadly, though, I feel the three-parter is a dead duck. I can't imagine finding a home for it as it stands and it's too complicated to chop down to make a shorter story. Sod it!
Now going to abandon the blog and writing anything today and go and mutter Bad Words in the garden...
4 comments:
Oh no!!! That sucks and I'm sure it must hurt...and from the weeklies that were so positive only last week! I suppose the only good side is that at least they did reply and did give feedback instead of just sending them into the great big dark hole of short stories that probably lives in a dark corner of the office somewhere....
I hope you can use the frustration to change them around somehow. That's no fun.
I hope tomorrow brings a whole new set of acceptances :)
mummy - thanks for the sympathy. It's all swings and roundabouts - a cliche and I don't care! - with writing I suppose, and yes, at least I've found out their fate which is something... But I'll never understand why some stories are accepted and some aren't. Ah, well - onwards and upwards...
Snap! Well, almost. I had two WW "too predictable" rejections this week as well! What do they want? Blood? (Actually, no. That'd be predictable as well, wouldn't it?)
Glad to know I'm in such good company. Your shorts predictable indeed! Tosh.
blimey Jan - lovely to see you here btw - how can yours be predicable too??? You don't do predictable! And we've been writing shorts FOREVER haven't we? So we must know how to avoid predictable by now! Thanks so much for telling me - doesn't make me feel so bad now. Must be WW's week for clearing out mss or feng shui-ing the office or something...
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