As most of you may imagine, writing a good book is hard. Editing it is hard, and no matter how many editors you go through, you will invariably find some sort of embarrassing typo the moment you've finalized things with the printers. That's expected, you learn to live with it or you wind up developing a drinking habit. (Or, sometimes, you learn to live with and you wind up developing a drinking habit.)
But once you've done all that, you have to go and try to convince the world you've written a book, that people should put a couple hours of their time into. That's the stage I'm at right now with Fallen Nation, and I've been somewhat amused today at some of the responses I've received from the first wave of submissions to literary magazines.
Here's one I found particularly ironic. Let's see if you share the sentiment:
"Thank you for your email. If you have asked a question, I will send you a personal response next time I check the Nocturnal Lyric emailbox. If you have sent a submission, please understand that we do not read or accept emailed submissions. If you are interested in the status of your mailed submission, or would like submission guidelines, you can read them on our website at: http://www.angelfire.com/ca/nocturnallyric"
(Sorry. If you run your magazine through an angelfire site, you seriously don't have the right to get high and mighty about submission guidelines in your automatic response letter. But it does help me out - I had my assistant compile the list of places to submit to, mostly through the Writers Market, and she obviously didn't recognize that "angelfire" = "do not want.")
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