Kilgore Trout Receives Yet Another Lit. Mag Rejection Letter
Dear Mr. Kilgore Trout,
Thank you for submitting once again to Nebulous Magazine, and allowing us the opportunity to read your manuscript. Although here at Nebulous we do not enforce a cap on submissions, I hope you do not mind me pointing out the “Maniacs in the Fourth Dimension” marks your thirty-fourth query this quarter. Perhaps taking a period of time between pieces could be beneficial, even for as prolific a writer as yourself.
While we appreciate your obvious passion for your craft, we regret to inform you that we are unable to place your piece in our pages at this time. To be absolutely frank with you, the interns who initially read your submission had very visceral, negative reactions to your ideas. One actually began vomiting.
Although due to the volume of submissions we receive, we are generally unable to provide authors with specific feedback, we have decided to make an exception for you:
· Our editors were concerned that you attempted to convey perhaps too many ideas in one piece of short fiction (although werewolves, vampires, time travel, Jesus Christ, sirens, Darwin, war, golf, and robots are all fascinating topics individually, especially when they are relegated to the fourth dimension, it is difficult to write about all of them in just 2,500 words or less).
· You seem to have some confusion surrounding how genre functions as a submission category. Although you may have felt you were “making a radical statement about reality” by submitting your startling Tralfamadorian alien abduction piece to our non-fiction department, this actually just confuses everyone involved. Perhaps you might look into our “magical realism” or “speculative fiction” portals going forward.
· While compelling in some circles, your particular brand of sadism has consistently unnerved our staff. If I am correct in my recollections, your submission before this one described “a tree with $20 bills for leaves uses its lucrative foliage as a lure for greedy people desperate for profit, who then ultimately kill each other and end up as fertilizer.” Although such a piece might have been intended as an allegory for the perils of capitalism, the execution of your ideas leaves much to be desired. Here at Nebulous, we do not rejoice in gratuitous violence and bloodshed. Similarly, although your romantically inclined writing may be at home in pornographic book shops, we don’t have a place for alien erotica.
We greatly appreciate your interest in working with us. As per your previous correspondences, we do recognize your contribution to the Sci-Fi literary scene. That being said, we cannot comment with any degree of veracity on whether you really “anticipated the use of Napalm in war” or “have important insights into the odd voyeurism of existent alien societies.”
We review each and every manuscript we receive, and we were happy to give your project our full attention. Thank you for giving us the time to thoroughly evaluate your submission, even though, as you have stated on multiple occasions, “time as humans conceive of it does not exist when you can get stuck in a time-window at any point.” Unfortunately, upon careful consideration, your manuscript does not align with the Nebulous brand and would be more appropriate for publishing elsewhere, perhaps even on one of the far off planets you are so fond of describing.
Sincerely,
Nebulous Editors
A Facet of the Ilium Gazette
