Magic Mike 6XL: The rejection board

Michael D. Davis.
My first short story acceptance letter hangs framed by the back door. My first 100 or so rejection letters hung for the longest time in the living room, under a comic strip of Snoopy writing a letter on his typewriter. The letter that Snoopy writes reads, “Gentlemen, Regarding the recent rejection slip you sent me. I think there might have been a misunderstanding. What I really wanted was for you to publish my story, and send me $50,000.”
The first short story I ever submitted to a publication was to Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine when I was still in high school. The story was about a husband who hated his wife and fantasized daily about her death. Then she dies. And the husband is angry because he didn’t get to kill her.
It wasn’t well written, but I liked the story. I got my rejection for that story a year and a half after I submitted it for consideration. And it went up on the wall.
For the first year and a half of writing and submitting stories, I did nothing but rack up rejections. And during that time I heard of a Stephen King quote. He said, “By the time I was 14, the nail in my wall would no longer support the weight of the rejection slips impaled upon it. I replaced the nail with a spike and went on writing.”
So I thought why not. I got one of those bulletin boards that’s not really a bulletin board, ya know it’s just got the ribbons crisscrossing. Frankly, I just got that one because it was in the shape of an old-fashioned gumball machine. Anyway, every time I got a rejection, I put it on the board. And through the years I got rejection after rejection after rejection. Eventually, the board was so fat with rejections that I had to start stapling them on, or else the board wouldn’t hold.
When you receive as many rejections as I have, something starts to happen. You somehow become both numb to it and picky about it. The numbness comes on naturally. When you get the 10th rejection for the same story, you don’t think ‘Poor me’, but ‘alright, now where am I gonna send it?’
The pickiness, well that may just be me. But there are mainly two different types of rejection letters, the personal, and the form letter. And I hate the form letter. It means nothing. Someone just copied and pasted the same old sentences with no thought or effort. And it’s boring.
Even the nastiest, rudest, personally written rejection letters I’ve received throughout the years, I’ve learned to love. My favorite rejection of all time said something like this, “You can’t talk about an egg salad sandwich fart in the first sentence.” I think I am the only writer in the world who has received a rejection that said something like that.
The joke’s on them though, the next place I sent it published it in a paperback anthology, so I guess you can start a story with a fart.
I got another rejection last week, and I must say it was one of the nicest I’ve ever received. I wrote back to the editor of the place telling him how much I enjoyed his rejection letter. In the letter he was nice and courteous, he complimented my story and told me where I could improve. It may sound like a run-of-the-mill rejection letter, but It was anything but. He wrote it in such a way that when I was done reading it I felt good about my story, myself, and the rewrites I previously had no plan to do. I guess sometimes a well-written rejection letter is better than a subpar acceptance letter. I kind of want to send him the fart story now, just to see what he says.