Mr. Not Quite

Well, it happened again.

In my email this afternoon was the following response to a short story submission:

“Hi Mark, well you made it right down to the wire. We enjoyed Love Potion #10 for UNMASKED. It was clever and amusing, and several members of our editorial team (eight grad students and me) picked it as one of their favorites. We received 535 submissions, and yours reached the top fifty, but you faced fierce competition and it just didn’t make the final round.  

“Thanks for writing such an enjoyable piece.  Best of luck in placing it elsewhere.”

I can’t tell you how often I get rejections like this. I make it to “the final cut” and then get cut. I”m good, just not good enough. I remain “Mr. Not Quite.” Hey, thanks for playing.

I don’t know what to do with these emails. When I got my first a few years ago, it made me feel good that I had made it so far. Maybe the next time, I thought to myself, I’m going to go over the top.

And, indeed, I do get stories accepted from time to time. I just had another Minerva James story accepted by Dandelion Revolution, which took a previous Minerva story for their anthology Not Quite As You Were Told. This makes seven Minerva short stories published in magazines and anthologies. So she’s doing well (though she also gets rejected from time to time).

But I’m not sure what to make of the “almost but not quite” rejections. I always answer politely, of course. No sense riling up an editor. But still, I wish when they told me I just missed that the editor would tell me why I didn’t make the last cut. “YOu should have had an Aardvark in the story. We always look for the Aardvark.” Something like that.

It’s the frustrating part of being a writer. I know objectively that each editor has his/her own sensibilities and what makes one editor reject a piece will be the exact thing that makes another editor jump for joy. I’ve had the experience of having one of my best stories being rejected by a magazine and then having that story picked up by another–then to read the rejecting magazine and find poorly written, cliched stories therein.

But this “Mr. Not Quite” business is crazy. It’s like the editor saying–as this one did–that the story is well done and that he personally likes it (as well as 8 of his staff) but…well, you know. Aardvarks.

I someday will write a memoir called “Rejection: A Love Story” in which I tell of the many different ways life and literature have rejected me. Then I’ll send it around to publishers, all of which will tell me they loved the book but it didn’t quite make the cut.

Sigh.