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Nov. 27th, 2004 05:32 pmI got rejection letters from F&SF ("Honest Man") and Amazing ("When Shlemiel Went to the Stars") yesterday. The Amazing rejection was quite the fakeout. I send disposable manuscripts, so normally I get a thin envelope back with just the rejection letter. The Amazing rejection arrived in a much bulkier envelope, and I thought, It's a contract! and ripped it open. A rejection, but he was enclosing an article he thought I might find interesting about Jewish SF. It was interesting, but highly disappointing when I was thinking, "oooh, a sale!"
I'm not sure where to send either of these next. At my reading, several people suggested that I try "Honest Man" on some mainstream markets. (It could pass as mainstream fiction among the same sort of people who don't understand why "The Lovely Bones" might be considered fantasy or horror.) The trouble is, I know the genre markets pretty well -- at least, I know who buys the sort of stuff I write, who pays well, who responds promptly, and which markets look really good in theory but aren't actually publishing magazines / paying contributors / responding to submissions / all of the above. I know jack squat about the mainstream markets. Other than that the big ones for fiction are the New Yorker and the Atlantic, right? I checked out the New Yorker's website for guidelines and all they say is that they read unsolicited fiction and that it should be e-mailed to them. They don't give you, oh, a length beyond which they're really not interested. This is the sort of information for which normal writers turn to Writer's Market, but (*drops voice to a whisper*) I don't actually own a copy. I had an old copy from 1993 for a long time, and the library has a copy and I used to use theirs. But the thing is, their listing of F&SF markets is really not useful -- at least, not nearly as useful as several free online sites. And I don't write articles -- it's an absolutely critical resource for those who write non-fiction freelance, but I don't, or at least I haven't in the past. So I don't buy it. Is it worth $30 to scrutinize the mainstream markets for fiction? Probably. Hey, even if I don't sell it somewhere mainstream, I'll have a lovely mostly-up-to-date reference book for a couple of years. (Yes, I could also go to the library, but it's typically in their reference section, and my days of spending hours reading things at the library are gone with the arrival of the kids.)
Anyway, I will probably try "Honest Man" on The New Yorker, because why not. Or Atlantic. After that, I don't know. Normally I send my fantasy stories to Realms or Strange Horizons after Gordon Van Gelder rejects them. However, "Honest Man" is special: it's the story I wrote for my grandmother as a gift for her birthday. (She's the protagonist of the story.) Grammie is not a web user (though she does have a little mailstation for e-mail use) so the allure of Strange Horizons would be largely lost on her. And she finds the covers of about 80% of the issues of Realms to be terribly embarrassing to have anywhere visible.
Shlemiel, well. They say that humor is harder to sell. They are right. I would send it to Planet Relish if that were still around, but it's not, alas. I will probably trunk it and wait for someone to do an anthology of Jewish-themed humorous SF.
In other news, we took the girls to the Science Museum today, courtesy of some free tickets from my sister's friend (and if I were one of the cool kids I would link to both of their livejournals, but I'm lame today, so I'll just say, "Hi! Thanks!") Molly loved it. She is not nearly as into dinosaurs as some kids her age, but she still thought they were cool. She loved the "excavate a dinosaur!" sandbox, the weather exhibits, the gravity well with the balls and coins you could roll down, etc. Kiera's favorite exhibit was the stairs. Though she did think that the ball suspended on air blowing upwards was REALLY cool (she wanted to take the ball and run off with it) and that one of the museum workers was her new best friend. She repeatedly tried to crawl into the woman's lap. We eventually figured out that she wanted her Walkie-Talkie.
Kiera's new word for the day: baby. This appears to be applied solely to OTHER babies, not to herself.
I'm not sure where to send either of these next. At my reading, several people suggested that I try "Honest Man" on some mainstream markets. (It could pass as mainstream fiction among the same sort of people who don't understand why "The Lovely Bones" might be considered fantasy or horror.) The trouble is, I know the genre markets pretty well -- at least, I know who buys the sort of stuff I write, who pays well, who responds promptly, and which markets look really good in theory but aren't actually publishing magazines / paying contributors / responding to submissions / all of the above. I know jack squat about the mainstream markets. Other than that the big ones for fiction are the New Yorker and the Atlantic, right? I checked out the New Yorker's website for guidelines and all they say is that they read unsolicited fiction and that it should be e-mailed to them. They don't give you, oh, a length beyond which they're really not interested. This is the sort of information for which normal writers turn to Writer's Market, but (*drops voice to a whisper*) I don't actually own a copy. I had an old copy from 1993 for a long time, and the library has a copy and I used to use theirs. But the thing is, their listing of F&SF markets is really not useful -- at least, not nearly as useful as several free online sites. And I don't write articles -- it's an absolutely critical resource for those who write non-fiction freelance, but I don't, or at least I haven't in the past. So I don't buy it. Is it worth $30 to scrutinize the mainstream markets for fiction? Probably. Hey, even if I don't sell it somewhere mainstream, I'll have a lovely mostly-up-to-date reference book for a couple of years. (Yes, I could also go to the library, but it's typically in their reference section, and my days of spending hours reading things at the library are gone with the arrival of the kids.)
Anyway, I will probably try "Honest Man" on The New Yorker, because why not. Or Atlantic. After that, I don't know. Normally I send my fantasy stories to Realms or Strange Horizons after Gordon Van Gelder rejects them. However, "Honest Man" is special: it's the story I wrote for my grandmother as a gift for her birthday. (She's the protagonist of the story.) Grammie is not a web user (though she does have a little mailstation for e-mail use) so the allure of Strange Horizons would be largely lost on her. And she finds the covers of about 80% of the issues of Realms to be terribly embarrassing to have anywhere visible.
Shlemiel, well. They say that humor is harder to sell. They are right. I would send it to Planet Relish if that were still around, but it's not, alas. I will probably trunk it and wait for someone to do an anthology of Jewish-themed humorous SF.
In other news, we took the girls to the Science Museum today, courtesy of some free tickets from my sister's friend (and if I were one of the cool kids I would link to both of their livejournals, but I'm lame today, so I'll just say, "Hi! Thanks!") Molly loved it. She is not nearly as into dinosaurs as some kids her age, but she still thought they were cool. She loved the "excavate a dinosaur!" sandbox, the weather exhibits, the gravity well with the balls and coins you could roll down, etc. Kiera's favorite exhibit was the stairs. Though she did think that the ball suspended on air blowing upwards was REALLY cool (she wanted to take the ball and run off with it) and that one of the museum workers was her new best friend. She repeatedly tried to crawl into the woman's lap. We eventually figured out that she wanted her Walkie-Talkie.
Kiera's new word for the day: baby. This appears to be applied solely to OTHER babies, not to herself.
