Thursday, October 11, 2007
RTFSG
Is it really so hard? I can't imagine that anyone who writes for a living, or even as an occasional hobby, can claim that reading a few hundred words is too taxing for them. The words I speak of are submission guidelines, and I am about to make one of those editorial rants that every single editor has made at least once since we were deciding whose mammoth drawing was worthy of the really good wall space in the cave. Five words: Read the ______ submission guidelines. The third word was excised from that sentence to maintain this post as family friendly, but it's seven letters long and rhymes with 'fucking'. Anyway, it's not those innocent souls who don't read the submission guidelines that really make me the most angry. I like to think of them as excited young artists, so enamored with their latest creation that the details escape them and they must send it now. No, more than these, the real bother is the applicant who prefaces their submission with the words "I read your submission guidelines", and then precedes to break every one of those guidelines, one by one. My God, people. It's like having a woman walk up to you and kick you in a very uncomfortable place, only to smile down at you, writhing in a ball on the floor, and say "I read today that it hurts when you kick someone there, and I swore I would never do it. Ever. Oh, by the way, can I have five dollars?"
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5 comments:
Laughing so hard I'm crying.
Here's your mistake:
"Though failure to stay within the lines is hardly grounds for dismissing an otherwise brilliant submission, we suggest that you stick to the guidelines as much as possible."
It's a very good thing, in my opinion, for an editor to think such a thing. Apparently, it's not so good (for a submissions editor's sanity) to state such a thing.
Quote from Sandra Kasturi, poetry editor of ChiZine:
"It seems that most people found my previous guidelines so amusing that they didn't think they needed to follow them. So, here are revised guidelines that are less entertaining, but ones you might actually pay attention to. Please do so."
I've already mentioned how I particularly appreciate her direction of poetic hopefuls to the Goth-O-Matic Poetry Generator.
Wow, Camille Alexa, alive and well and in the blogosphere. Yeah, good advice. I probably do need to rewrite those guidelines, but there is a part of me that sees doing so as an admission about the intelligence of some of my submitting authors that I am not yet ready to make.
Hey: ChiZine is a long-established, SFWA-qualifying (ooooh...) pro mag. If they can have the same reaction to sloppy subs you can, I think you're in good company.
This should be my last publilc transmission before next weekend. Keep up the good work on 1097! I see lots of rejections reported on Duotrope....
Yeah, apparently quite a few of our submitters are Duotrope members. It's a nice site. I like it. I don't use it for writing, just because I have my own little spreadsheet dealy for my own stuff, but I definitely search for markets there. When I get around to writing, which is not often lately.
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