A while back, I posted a rejection from Neotrope, and commented that the letter made it clear I had submitted before, but that I couldn’t recall having done so. I speculated that as I slogged through my back catalog of rejection letters, I might find that elusive, Original Neotrope Rejection.
Well, I found another Neotrope rejection…but this one, too, refers to a previous submission! So I submitted to Neotrope at least three times and I have yet to find the first rejection. I’ll keep looking. In the meantime, here’s the latest:
If you can’t read that handwritten bit, it says:
–Thanks for sending again, Barry. I’d say this is more poetry than fiction, but feel free to try us with more stuff in the future.
It’s good to see that I was making some progress — I had submitted a couple of stories, obviously, and just as obviously they were nothing Neotrope wanted to publish, but they kept encouraging me to try again. That’s better than a form letter or being invited to try again and then botching it so badly that you get a dreaded form letter after a couple of encouraging rejections, right?
I have no idea which story I would have submitted back then that was “more poetry than fiction,” other than my short story “Bobby”…which was the subject of the other Neotrope rejection! So it can’t be that.
Oh, the mysteries of life…