12.23.2007
It's Sunday morning and I'm in California visiting my family for Christmas. It's been a fairly slow morning and after my father's eggs and a quick cigarette, I thought, "Yeah... I should check my email."
And that's when I found rejection number thirty-three. The rejection in question was for Skin. After thirty-seven days in Interzone's hands, I received the following:
Immense time pressures necessitate this reversion to a standardised reply, for which the submission devouring destroying analysing equipment apologises (and for the purple prose, as well... ;-). In short: this is not for us, but - you never know - it might be for someone else.
So... yeah.
What's funny is that I'd already written my end of the year wrap up because I figured I was pretty much safe through the end of the year. Not so!
Oh well.
On a side note, may I ask? What's with this new fad of striking words but leaving them in for people to read? It seemed clever the first time I saw it but now it's just cliche. I mean no offense to this fine editor. But I read Reason all of the time and they do it constantly. Frankly, it seems to me like an editor's in-joke gone awry. Could this be the downside of the whole "blog" thing?
Yeah...
As you may remember, Skin was my attempt at a "House" episode. Sort of... not really... but it was a "medical mystery".
Anyway, I was hoping Interzone would dig on it because it's more "sci-fi-y" than most of my work. I also thought it was pretty lean, all things considered, and would slip past.
But I was wrong. This marks the first rejection for Skin but I think it's good enough for many, many more.
So... there you go, kids. A new rejection on the eve of a New Year.
Merry Christmas.