Another Rejection

The US Post Office finally deigned to deliver our mail today. I'm not sure what happened with our mail hold while we were on vacation -- they were supposed to deliver our mail last Wednesday, but they didn't get around to it until today.

Sitting in our mail box wa a large conglomorate of messages bound together with two rubber bands. Nestled in amoung the junk mail from the Baby Industrial Millitary Complex and various mortgage companies was a slim envelope from Polyphony. I've developed a writer's feel for letters. The ones that have a mass that's slightly more than the mass of the envelope are rejection letters. I imagine that an acceptance letter is hefty with a contract. The one from Polyphony was wan and thin.

Anyway, the negligent mass of the envelope spoke to my spinal cord and I knew that a rejection letter lay concealed within. I said 'damn' in front of Arthur several times. I shivied open the envelope and there it was, the dreaded form letter, "Thanks for playing," with a nice and encouraging hand-written note from Deborah Layne.

So, with this rejection it's pretty clear that I don't quite understand the market for my stories. I'd like to think that I'm simply sending things to the wrong markets; the alternative is that I'm outclassed, and my writing can't compete against other stories. The next step is to re-evaluate what I've written from a marketing point of view.