Alright, so I just did my September submissions, and I need to vent my frustrations. Here's what I wish people would do:
1. Don't start your email with "Dear Sir." That makes me stop reading immediately. I don't care if you're the Poet of the 21st century, if you won a fucking laurel...if you haven't done enough research about my company to know that I'm a girl, then go away. Samantha is nowhere near a boy's name.
2. Run your spellcheck! Grammatical errors tell me you're dumb, but spelling errors tell me you're just lazy.
3. I also don't care where else you've been published. If it doesn't have a distribution upwards of 10,000, I just don't want to know. Tell me if you've been in something important; otherwise, just shut up.
4. Editors can smell a form letter from a mile away, and most of us hate them.
5. Don't try to rhyme. If you're still nibbling at the small presses, you're not talented enough for rhyming.
6. I'm very sorry that you're depressed, that he/she left you, that your daddy didn't love you or that he loved you too much and in indecent, illegal ways. Just 'cause you're sad doesn't mean you should write to me about it.
7. Please, please don't double space your epic poem. Or any of the rest of them. It's hard on the eyes.
Sigh. This was a tough month to read...we've got the reading time down, so I was reading submissions sent in March. townee was the only one of my regulars. I'm afraid that one of these days writers like townee and Mickey Z are going to realize that they can publish up higher in the food chain and leave me with all dumbasses. Jon Jackson once said to Thom Jones "Editors don't want to buy your stories. They get tons of stories. You have to write something that's so good they can't reject it." Those bits are the reason I do this; why I want to do this forever. But sometimes that's hard to remember.
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