One of my favorite scenes in Tim Burton's Ed Wood Jr. is when the infamous director, played by Johnny Depp, is told by a producer that his movie is terrible. Ed Wood, ever the optimist, says, "Worst film you ever saw? Well my next one will be better."
Rejection. There's no way around it. My favorite rejection for Beneath A Panamanian Moon came from a publisher who objected to my portayal of the Vietnamese as "giggling, thieving children." For those of you who have not read the book, there are no Vietnamese in BAPM.
Or the time I got a rejected manuscript back from an agent, which would have been OK if it had been my rejected manuscript. But it was some other poor schmuck's rejected manuscript. So I returned it to the agent with the note:
"Thank you for sending me this manuscript. Unfortunately, it does not meet my
needs at this time."
It made me feel a little better.
So, while I actually do some work, tell us about your favorite rejection. The more horrible, the better.
You know what they say about misery.
10 comments:
For The Big Blind: "Two losers find a body. Where's the mystery in that?"
The fact that one of those losers causes the body seems to have slipped past the old radar there. But as you can imagine, the tone of it really stuck in my craw.
No one, on our sizeable staff, voted for its publication.
Not a book rejection, but right after I got married I applied for a job a video store. They hired a high school kid. Apparently being in college doesn't qualify you to rent out videos to people. You have to be sixteen to do that.
Liked the videos by the way, for some reason they reminded me of Bambi Meets Godzilla, which always makes me giggle.
A small literary journal sent me a rejection with the note "Always include a self-addressed stamped envelope."
The rejection arrived in the self-addressed stamped envelope I sent them.
VG
I remember a rejection that read, in part: "Too clever by half." Which confused me for the longest time. Did that mean it still need a half part of clever added? Or that it exceeded the amount of acceptable cleverness by exactly 50%?
Those cartoons are the funniest things I've seen in a long time.
"I really enjoyed THE DEVIL'S RIGHT HAND but unfortunately, I don't know how to sell it."
Nothing spectacular, just a paragraph about how I might want to invest in conferences and writers' workshops. My reaction: "My pages were that bad?" Ah well.
Seeing as I've never submitted a lot of work, I've only ever received one rejection, from Murdaland. It made it past the first round and they said some very nice things.
Sometimes I look at that rejection to remind to write more.
At one point quite a few years ago there was a gallery that was interested in some of the roadscapes I was doing at the time. The owner had seen a few things in a group show I was in, and let a friend of mine know he might want to show my work. I didn't get all excited, I had heard more than one horror story about him. When we finally talked he said he thought that I had great potential. If...
If they were smaller, lighter in tone (means add lots of white) and had some people and houses in them.
There was also something about using pink, but by that point I was trying to recall the original concept of the paintings,-SDA
I tried to get a job at a restaurant once. Actually, it was a diner! They were just opening up and needed a large staff. And still, no room for me.
And to think, I almost went in to acting.
As I got in my car to leave, "Send Me On My Way" was playing on the radio. God damn.
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