The Queen of Rejection

As the editorial assistant at a book publishing company—or, as I’d been dubbed by a friend, the office monkey—a key part of my job consisted of rejecting. Reject, reject, reject. By phone and by mail. By email and by fax. Everyone (and their mother) has written a book, it seems, and our company would be missing out on a great opportunity if we didn’t snap up their manuscript.

Armed with a firm "no unsolicited proposals or manuscripts" policy, I shot down countless hopefuls like skeet. Pull. BAM. Pull. BAM. As a novice writer myself, I felt sympathetic…for about the first two months. Then I moved on to slightly sadistic pleasure, and the Queen of Rejection was born. She was helped along by the sad fact that any manuscripts she bothered to peruse were, well, simply awful. She especially loved proposals written on notebook paper, or that began with something like "I ain’t no good writer, but…"

Fortunately for our company image and reputation, the Queen of Rejection has a pleasant, polite phone voice and an unyielding well of resolve.

Now, as I wave goodbye to my time as office monkey, I leave the pile of rejects with very little feeling. They have, in turn, offended, amused, and irritated me until all sensitivity was gone. I can tear through a pile of proposals in about five minutes, mostly because it takes me that long to tear open the envelopes, chuck the material in the recycling bin, and keep one piece of paper with the author’s address on it. I let the envelopes and letters pile for a couple weeks, and have a grand day of form-letter rejections.

If I’m lucky, the hopeful author sent me a SASE. If I’m unlucky, they send in their project, call two or three times, lose the rejection letter I’ve sent them, call again six months later, and then demand I return their manuscript because it was their only copy. Some even darkly hint that I’ve kept their material for my own use. That is when the Queen really struggles not to roar.

So, kids, what’s the moral of the story? Well, there really isn’t one, I suppose. Mostly because the worst cases dealt with by the Queen seemed to involve people who had never used a computer and had no idea what a blog is. They won't be reading this--and therefore won't learn from my experience. It’s awful hard to edjumacate them there folks what don’t use the web-net thingy.

I guess there are one or two or three things you can learn from the Queen: 1) PLEASE PLEASE research the publishing company’s policy before sending in your wondrous creations, 2) it’s perfectly acceptable to make stabbing motions with your pen while you’re on the phone, as long as you don’t make any noise, and 3) callously sharing snippets of someone’s creative endeavor with your friends to make them laugh is probably the most use anyone will every get out of that sad material, so make sure you’ve taken the author’s name off, and go for it.