We’re Not Publishing Your Story, But Here’s Why We’re Awesome Anyway
Dear Writer:
We can’t tell you how honored we are that you sent your story to us for consideration. We understand that writing a story is like bearing a child, and sending it out into the world just to watch it get rejected and humiliated and deemed completely worthless is a kind of pain no person should ever have to endure.
That said, we have to reject your story. We don’t want to, but we absolutely have to. It just didn’t have that oomph for us, you know? That je ne sais quoi that sets the stories we do publish — the ones not written by you — into a different, some might say better, class.
We’d like you to know that we read each piece with care. We’re not like those journals who skim a writer’s bio and pick stories based on writing credentials. We sit down, roll up our sleeves, and pore over every word before selecting which ones will be good enough to get included and which are amateurish wastes of time. So, if you were thinking that maybe we passed on your story because of some prejudice on our part, you couldn’t be more wrong — our choice was purely based on how good or how not-good your story is.
I bet you didn’t expect us to be so long-winded about this, did you? That’s because we’re not stuffy, soulless intelligentsia who send off impersonal…
