Vacation Auto-Response
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
For today's dose of rejection, please investigate our scintillating article in this week's issue of The Stranger. Even longer sentences! bigger words! and NO CUSSING!!!
Have a very nice holiday, fellow Americans! Perhaps tomorrow everyone will take a moment to honor the memory of the countless indigenous inhabitants of the Americas who were (and continue to be) lied to, cheated, stolen from, forcibly relocated, murdered, and denied basic human rights so that we can sit around stuffing our faces with turkey and pretending we are celebrating family and not genocide. Just do it for us, please, okay? Okay. Thank you.
See you next week, Author-friends!
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Ah, the memories...
When I was a lit mag editor I got a submission from a Federal Prison. Handwritten. And instead of whiteout they used wetted bits of toilet paper. Wetted it, stuck it on, let it dry, and then wrote in the corrections.
That's what I call determination to find an audience.
So... have you legally changed your name to The Rejectionist yet? That would be cool. Even as a pen name it's pretty darn good. I totally need me a Lemony Snicketish sort of name. Surely fame and fortune will follow...
What's a little genocide between friends?
But really, you have nothing to feel guity about. I am officially related by blood to a long line of Conquistadors and bullfighters, and we rarely apologize for anything. Yes, the Euro-trash Kings of Douche-bagness
So you are off the hook. Go eat your dead bird with relish. I'll be eating mine.
Trust me, it is soooo challenging to teach The First Thanksgiving to second graders and discuss Native Americans without using the phrase "screwed over."
OK, am not usually so shamelessly self-promoting, but my blog post earlier this week dealt exactly with this (in as much of a humorous manner as possible):
http://sherrystanfa-stanley.blogspot.com/2009/11/top-ten-things-squanto-would-have-told.html
This. Is. AWESOME.
"The bad query's sentence sometimes resembles a battlefield wherein subjects hack it out desperately with adjectives, perennially besieged by legions of unwieldy adverbs. Apostrophes go on suicide missions and commas appear at random."
The hilarity of that snippet will carry me through your absence. THANKS.
@Portuguese cunt: Ah, the Portuguese weren't that bad. Their ideology was based more on assimilation-through-intermarriage with the natives rather than straight out genocide, which the other colonial powers preferred. I say, better a few more mixed-bloods alive rather than a lot of pure-bloods dead, although there are many groups throughout illustrious human history who'd disagree. ;)
Thus spaketh another blood descendant of Portuguese colonialism. But thanks for mentioning the genocide angle, TR. It just warmed my chill, post-colonialist heart.
that article was amazing. such fantastic insight into the enigma that is the crappy query letter.
penned one myself a few times, actually.
well. okay. not THAT bad.
anyway, i think you're fantastic.
oh, wait, sorry, yea -- ive been stalking your blog for awhile now. thought id finally say hello.
cough.
Good article...I read slush for 3 years and I would never do it again--too depressing. We did keep a "weirdness file" for the truly bizarre stuff. One book I plucked out of slush was published and it's still in print--THE GIANT CARROT by Jan Peck (a picture book) so that's the cool part, when you find a gem.
Great article! :-D Your comment regarding the fact that the bulk of your truly strange queries come from placid backwaters and sleepy Midwestern towns, that vast expanse of "the middle" so famously spurned by New Yorkers and left-coasters alike made me think two things:
One - You're talking about, actually, the bulk of the country. I know this scares Left Coasters and New Yorkers find it hard to believe, but there are more of us than there are of you. That's probably why more queries come from here. ;)
Two - However, just to be on the safe side (you do like me, don't you?), I live in rural Missouri, between Clinton and Warsaw with Calhoun and Windsor both less than twenty miles away. If you *should* happen to get anything really scary from my neck of the woods . . . will you warn me? :D
Dear Rejectionist,
Thanks be for your delightful Stranger article and this blog! Surely the intertubes were invented for this ultimate destiny, to expose the shady backstreet dealings of New York elitist conspirators of the printed word and world doom.
Seriously, reading your nerdelicious musings from the distance of Tokyo made my heart ache for New York, still the cultural capital of the world.
Look forward to following your future exploits!
Thanks for writing this, which has turned me on to your blog.
Your article was read aloud over the dinner table last night to a child who had this idea of being a writer stuck in her head (note to kid: announce that you'd like to shoot heroin as a profession. It'll be more economically rewarding and less damaging to your health).
While not encouraging or discouraging anyone from joining the writer's trade, it DID result in everyone laughing uproariously.
Ooh ooh! Shiny new site!
AREN'T WE CLEVER
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