This one's a writing column, so if that doesn't interest you, you can skip this one.
Many years back I fell in with a group of horror writers on a message board. I have zero interactions with them now for a variety of reasons, not just the story I'm about to tell. A couple of them became fairly well known in the community. One of them has become infamous for ripping people off (their money, not their writing). But the message board, like most of them, is long gone. I'm not naming names.
They were doing an anthology. It turned out to be their third, actually, but I didn't know that until later. Back then I was a complete nobody, not just the partial nobody I am today. I'd had a few publications under my belt but nothing serious. The most money I'd made off writing was for getting published in porno mags. It should be noted that those paydays are really fucking good, more than almost any horror story I sold. If you want to make money writing, you should write porn.
Anyway, I desperately wanted to be in that anthology. I felt it in my gonads, I wanted it that bad. So I put together the best horror story I could come up with at the time and sent it to the editor. I can't tell you how badly that reject letter hurt. I'd been in the game for maybe ten years by then, and I thought I was immune to rejection, it had happened so many times. I always put those letters in a box and got the story ready to submit elsewhere within minutes. Water off a duck's back. But that one time, ooh. It was rough.
But I bought the anthology anyway, and it took me until now to read it.
Holy shit, it was bad. The first thing I noticed was the abhorrently shitty formatting, which is bad enough, but the stories were not very good. Almost all of them weren't even decent. A lot of them weren't even stories. They were vignettes, which I'm not a big fan of. I would have been flat out embarrassed to be in this fucking thing.
It did have a cool cover, though.
The lesson I'm trying to impart is that rejection is not just NOT the end of the world, it can sometimes be a god thing. Because I *do* have stories in bad anthologies, and it *does* embarrass me. Don't dwell on these things. Just get ready for the next submission.
One more lesson, and it's a difficult one. Especially today when anthologies are so goddam specific. Like, the story has to happen on a rainy Tuesday in a graveyard on Pluto, or something ridiculous like that. Never write something specifically for one publication. If it gets rejected, what are you going to do? Send it elsewhere? Editors are aware of what's being published out there, and they'll sniff you out quickly even if you do change the story a bit. That will lead to another rejection. There are exceptions. If you are invited to a publication requesting a specific kind of story, go for it. If you're invited, the chances that they'll accept it are higher than usual. The possibility of rejection is still there, so don't get too cocky, but you're probably going to get your story in there.
I've only ever broken this rule once. It was for a GG Allin anthology called BLOOD FOR YOU. I did it because I was reasonably sure I would be accepted not just because I'm friends with one of the editors (even friends will reject you sometimes in this business; don't take it personally, just roll with it and stay friends), but because I had a great story idea. GG Allin looking to score heroin in Leng? It was such an easy story to write that the only thing I was afraid of was that everyone had written one with Allin and Lovecraft. It genuinely surprised me to learn that mine was the only one.
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