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Rejected by Silverfish.

Received my first rejection ever in the email today. My Water Tower short story isn't going to make it into the next New Writing collection. Ah well. It was my first "proper" short story and it probably wasn't as polished as it could have been, or it probably wasn't the editor's cup of tea, perhaps?

I'll be posting it up on this blog soon. Let's see what you think. (I need to go back and look at it too; I bet it'll be one cringe-fest for me.)

Anyway, I've got other stories I'm waiting on and in the meantime, I shall just keep on writing.

UPDATE:
Story is up! Read here.
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Comments

  1. Anonymous23/5/06 10:07 am

    i'd be interested to read it.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Ted Mahsun23/5/06 10:15 am

    Thanks! You can read it on the blog, probably tomorrow or the next day. I'll have to edit the story for web formatting first. Arr, such a tedious task.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Reta23/5/06 12:10 pm

    yea post it up no harm =)

    ReplyDelete
  4. Ted Mahsun23/5/06 1:25 pm

    No harm? Apart from all the boos and bricks hurled at me right? Hahaha

    ReplyDelete
  5. Anonymous24/5/06 9:58 am

    ah.... hey teds, i got a great new idea. self publishing photostat copies of fiction chapbooks...

    its brilliant.

    much better then my pulp magazine thing. more class i think.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Ted Mahsun24/5/06 10:07 am

    I dunno... you lose a lot of presentation points when you go the photocopy route...

    Unless you can maintain quality la. And layout somehow blows ppl's minds away. Oh, can good content, of course. But that goes without saying.

    ReplyDelete
  7. bibliobibuli24/5/06 10:42 am

    congrats on being brave enough to submit your work

    rejection goes with the territory of sending work in, and you shouldn't get discouraged

    keep writing and work at improving your craft ... you might find an online critiquing group useful ... where you share your work and comment on others

    try also sending your work to other publications (especially magazines) - the silverfish books tend to favour literary fiction which may not be your thing

    above all - become addicted to reading and consume as much good literature as you can to develop your writing muscles

    you have the determination, now you need to develop the craft

    ReplyDelete
  8. Ted Mahsun24/5/06 11:16 am

    Thanks for the advice, Sharon!

    I suppose people will go hyena at me when I say this: when I wrote my short story for Silverfish, I considered it "literary". Oh, the shame!

    I actually am planning to send out a few stories to other publications. One of them's nearly done, and once I print that one out, off it goes in an envelope to America. Got a few others lined up too... can't wait to finish writing these stories and sending them out to various publications around the world (and getting their rejection slips :p).

    I'm really not afraid of rejection. I think I read somewhere that one truly isn't a writer if they haven't faced rejection before. I just hope the rejections I will face will help me to become a better writer, spurring me on to write better and better.

    The addiction to reading's no problem. I think you know I have that already ;)

    ReplyDelete
  9. Anonymous24/5/06 2:20 pm

    thats wat i thought when i heard about these chapbooks things. but ive been looking them up over the internet, and they all have this great brownish sepia thing going - nampak cool. or is that just because their old?

    ReplyDelete
  10. Ted Mahsun24/5/06 3:05 pm

    I think that's because they're old laa! ^_^

    But here's a thought, you can recreate that cool "old" look by photocopying using coloured paper, like the ones used for project covers. Yellowish-brown would be nice. Not sure whether the photocopy dudes would be cool with it though.

    Then YEAH that'd be cool.

    ReplyDelete

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