"Dear Publisher: How are you doing? I hope that your doing good [sic, sic, sic]. I am a poet." I'm thinking, okay, this is clearly a child. No. Ladies and gentlemen, not only is this a veritable adult-human, but this adult-human has won poetry awards and has been published. I am losing faith in everything. I make an extraordinary number of allowances! I, too, typo up my life. But "I hope that your doing good" makes my skin crawl! Furthermore, he mixed "your" and "you're" up in one of his poems, too. Sighhhh. Learn your homophones, people. I know that you can be an intelligent person and still not know the difference between their, they're, and there, your and you're, but you cannot, cannot, CANNOT be a successful writer.
Actually, I don't know that that's true. SIGH.
"Daffodils we try to quell...yet they sprout like a golden spell...enclosed find a poem about these flowers...I think it will entertain you for hours...Thank you for considering my submission...I hope it aligns with your magazine's vision..." Cover letters in verse do nothing for me. But thank you for the thought.
Also, get the name of the publisher right on your envelope. I WILL notice if you get it wrong, especially if the word our company becomes suddenly takes on a dismal meaning.
For serious, people, I know I kid around with you, but, as Blackadder would say, "Underneath this playful, boyish exterior beats the heart of a ruthless, sadistic maniac" and you MUST, MUST, MUSTTT stop gluing your envelopes to your submissions. Thank you.
Now it occurs to me that I have never exactly explained what this whole process is (and this occurred to me when my dear friend Emily, who is, in addition to being my dear friend, a loyal reader of this bloggy thing, said 'wait, so what exactly do you DO? what's a first reader? what do they do? huhhhh?').
For this particular magazine, where we get too-many submissions each day and have a Lowly Intern doing the mail, the system is thus!:
Lowly Intern comes in Monday, Thursday. (Also Tuesday and Wednesday but non-mail days are of no interest to us just now). She sees "holy shit that is a big-ass pile of mail." After lunch, when she is bored and caffeinated, she takes on the mail pile which, incidentally, is situated just a bit above her 5'2 head and likes to slide and fall and die. Usually, therefore, she takes the in-tray down before getting the submissions, but since last time this backfired on her, she now takes the mail down bit by bit.
(It is CRUCIAL, dear readers, that you understand this process.)
Lowly Intern then staggers to her desk, where she hones her letter-opening skills (only tore one submission last week!). She checks the contents of each envelope quickly. Makes piles: Biggest (usually) is sumbissions; a few that were supposed to go to accounting; review copies of books for EA; art submissions which go to art department. Sometimes things that are just WEIRD, like, for example, Tinkerbell paraphernalia.
Having gotten rid of non-submissions, Lowly Intern begins the painful process of sorting them. Writers, PLEASE make sure your name is printed CLEARLY on your return address. Otherwise, when Lowly Intern goes to check your name against the VIP list, Lowly Intern has to take out your letter, unfold it, find your name (which is never where she thinks it will be), check it on the list, refold it because you weren't a VIP, battle it back into the envelope, and tear her hair out. True, this process is not the end of LI's life when it only happens once or twice, but in a pile of 100 envelopes, if she has to do that with 60 of them, she wants to die.
VIPs are unclear to LI. She thinks that they are authors who have been published in our mags before, but not ALL authors who have been published in our mags before are VIPs. Very mysterious. Regardless. Though LI checks all names against VIP list, she pulls out only 2 or 3 VIPs each mail day. She also pulls out Humor Submissions.
Anything else goes in a Box. Boxes fill slowly. Oh. So. Slowly. In perhaps two weeks (or two days. It really depends on the size of the box and how much mail LI gets), she seals the box up, battles with the UPS website which does not agree with her ancient computer, and sends the box to a first reader.
First Readers are freelance somethingorothers who take our Big Box o' Crazies (sorry, writers, but most of our submissions are from Crazies) and read through them. We send them, in addition to ~100+ submissions, 100+ form rejects.
FR form reject (whoaaaaaa....FR...FR....coincidence? I think not.) MOST of what we send them. And then they send US a packet of the rest of them. This packet gets "INTERN" written on it, even though they swear they know LI's name.
Lowly Intern then reads through these ~50 or so submissions. She rejects most of them. She is a fraidy cat, though, so she sends perhaps 10-13 of them on to EA.
EA rejects most of them. In fact, most of them she gives back to LI to form reject. LI then feels silly for passing on something Form Rejectable.
The ones that we pass on, we write Reading Reports (RRs) on. They are mostly "Yes" "no" "Maybe", or in the case of one of our AEs, "if only this was better..." Then we suggest which magazine...and some comments i.e. "Ew, no, get it away." or "Writing was okay but plot fell flat here, here, and here..." RRs are saved on the same server, it goes from LI to EA to AE*s of various magazines, to the MAIN EDITOR.
---
*still Associate Editor, if we've forgotten.
---
One of my favorite things to do when I'm bored is to go through old RR's and see where the stories I've passed on are at. It's nice to see that two or three of them have gotten resounding "yes!"s ... And one I passed on half as a joke got really positive responses, too. It was a silly little fairy-tale that was goofily told and I was SURE it was going to get sent straight back to me to form reject, but no! It was liked!
Anyway, now that I've bored you all to death, I am off. I, you will be jealous to hear, am watching Hell's Kitchen. I am also finishing up Philip Lopate's "Getting Personal" which I semi-recommend. It is quite good. Just also quite long. And he has that intellectual's way of writing essays which is way more long-winded than, say, my lover Eula Biss. He sticks on one topic for aaaaages without bringing in any other random facts, then moves on logically from point to point to make his argument, sometimes backtracking and parentheticalling in a kind of confusing way. (Wow I'm making this sound terrible. It's a really good book! Great essays! It's a tiny bit dense for me. I tend to like essays that meander about, weaving lots of bite-sized tidbits into something big and fascinating. Like Hell's Kitchen. I'm kidding, I'm kidding. Or am I?)
Now it occurs to me that I have never exactly explained what this whole process is (and this occurred to me when my dear friend Emily, who is, in addition to being my dear friend, a loyal reader of this bloggy thing, said 'wait, so what exactly do you DO? what's a first reader? what do they do? huhhhh?').
For this particular magazine, where we get too-many submissions each day and have a Lowly Intern doing the mail, the system is thus!:
Lowly Intern comes in Monday, Thursday. (Also Tuesday and Wednesday but non-mail days are of no interest to us just now). She sees "holy shit that is a big-ass pile of mail." After lunch, when she is bored and caffeinated, she takes on the mail pile which, incidentally, is situated just a bit above her 5'2 head and likes to slide and fall and die. Usually, therefore, she takes the in-tray down before getting the submissions, but since last time this backfired on her, she now takes the mail down bit by bit.
(It is CRUCIAL, dear readers, that you understand this process.)
Lowly Intern then staggers to her desk, where she hones her letter-opening skills (only tore one submission last week!). She checks the contents of each envelope quickly. Makes piles: Biggest (usually) is sumbissions; a few that were supposed to go to accounting; review copies of books for EA; art submissions which go to art department. Sometimes things that are just WEIRD, like, for example, Tinkerbell paraphernalia.
Having gotten rid of non-submissions, Lowly Intern begins the painful process of sorting them. Writers, PLEASE make sure your name is printed CLEARLY on your return address. Otherwise, when Lowly Intern goes to check your name against the VIP list, Lowly Intern has to take out your letter, unfold it, find your name (which is never where she thinks it will be), check it on the list, refold it because you weren't a VIP, battle it back into the envelope, and tear her hair out. True, this process is not the end of LI's life when it only happens once or twice, but in a pile of 100 envelopes, if she has to do that with 60 of them, she wants to die.
VIPs are unclear to LI. She thinks that they are authors who have been published in our mags before, but not ALL authors who have been published in our mags before are VIPs. Very mysterious. Regardless. Though LI checks all names against VIP list, she pulls out only 2 or 3 VIPs each mail day. She also pulls out Humor Submissions.
Anything else goes in a Box. Boxes fill slowly. Oh. So. Slowly. In perhaps two weeks (or two days. It really depends on the size of the box and how much mail LI gets), she seals the box up, battles with the UPS website which does not agree with her ancient computer, and sends the box to a first reader.
First Readers are freelance somethingorothers who take our Big Box o' Crazies (sorry, writers, but most of our submissions are from Crazies) and read through them. We send them, in addition to ~100+ submissions, 100+ form rejects.
FR form reject (whoaaaaaa....FR...FR....coincidence? I think not.) MOST of what we send them. And then they send US a packet of the rest of them. This packet gets "INTERN" written on it, even though they swear they know LI's name.
Lowly Intern then reads through these ~50 or so submissions. She rejects most of them. She is a fraidy cat, though, so she sends perhaps 10-13 of them on to EA.
EA rejects most of them. In fact, most of them she gives back to LI to form reject. LI then feels silly for passing on something Form Rejectable.
The ones that we pass on, we write Reading Reports (RRs) on. They are mostly "Yes" "no" "Maybe", or in the case of one of our AEs, "if only this was better..." Then we suggest which magazine...and some comments i.e. "Ew, no, get it away." or "Writing was okay but plot fell flat here, here, and here..." RRs are saved on the same server, it goes from LI to EA to AE*s of various magazines, to the MAIN EDITOR.
---
*still Associate Editor, if we've forgotten.
---
One of my favorite things to do when I'm bored is to go through old RR's and see where the stories I've passed on are at. It's nice to see that two or three of them have gotten resounding "yes!"s ... And one I passed on half as a joke got really positive responses, too. It was a silly little fairy-tale that was goofily told and I was SURE it was going to get sent straight back to me to form reject, but no! It was liked!
Anyway, now that I've bored you all to death, I am off. I, you will be jealous to hear, am watching Hell's Kitchen. I am also finishing up Philip Lopate's "Getting Personal" which I semi-recommend. It is quite good. Just also quite long. And he has that intellectual's way of writing essays which is way more long-winded than, say, my lover Eula Biss. He sticks on one topic for aaaaages without bringing in any other random facts, then moves on logically from point to point to make his argument, sometimes backtracking and parentheticalling in a kind of confusing way. (Wow I'm making this sound terrible. It's a really good book! Great essays! It's a tiny bit dense for me. I tend to like essays that meander about, weaving lots of bite-sized tidbits into something big and fascinating. Like Hell's Kitchen. I'm kidding, I'm kidding. Or am I?)
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