Great Expectations

October 5, 2009

Today,  I got my first rejection letter as a writer.  Actually, it wasn’t even a letter.  It was a rejection e-mail.  It was from McSweeney’s.  A lot of people I talk to don’t know what McSweeney’s is, and I suppose that given the state of reading today, that is normal.  I don’t even know what it is, really.  As near as I can tell, it is a website that is full of contributed materials from all kinds of writers, although there seems to be some favoritism towards certain ones.  Perhaps, because they are good.  They also have a division that publishes and sells books from people who contribute to their site.  

It seems like most of the material is humor based, although that is certainly not a prerequisite.  I like that about the site, though.  I enjoy reading the humor and much of it is quite good.  I also fancy myself a humor writer which seems to be a subject that is very much open for debate at present.  I have written a few things over the last couple of years based on the formats that McSweeney’s seems to endorse on their website.  They have categories for writing in Lists (kind of like a top ten list of funny items), Open Letters to People or Entities Who are Unlikely to Respond (these are particularly hilarious to me), and the rest are just kind of parodies of everyday events or common practices in business, or what have you.

Almost everything that they publish is hilarious.  Only on occasion do I think something is dull or not particularly witty.  Sometimes, I totally miss the humor in a piece because the subject material is above my head.  The people who get published seem to be extremely well educated.  That is another component of the website that I like.  I am not very well educated, so when I am able to comprehend the material in an essay on the website, it makes me feel really smart. 

The piece that I selected for submission was an open letter to my neighbor that I had written about a year and a half ago.  It is a terribly fictional account of an occurrence in the Spring of 2008.  It was written very quickly and has what I think are some truly funny elements.  Although it may not be the most groundbreaking piece ever to be submitted to McSweeney’s, I did judge it to be slightly funnier than some of the things that have been published.  This was my criteria for submitting the piece.

About a week after sending it in, I got an e-mail response from “Kelly”, an intern at McSweeney’s.  She said, “I appreciate the look, but I’m afraid I am going to pass on this one.”  I don’t really know what that means.  What does it mean when you turn something in that is not visual in nature and someone says that they appreciate “the look”?  I chalked it up to industry-speak.  You don’t want to ask “Kelly” what she meant when she said,“the look”, and make a fool of yourself to an intern.  So, I sent her an e-mail response thanking her for reading it and promising that I would try again.

When I got the rejection e-mail, I was kind of crushed.  Most people would say that this is a fairly normal reaction.  Maybe so, but I was kind of expecting this to be the start of something glorious.  Not that it warranted glory, but just kind of because that’s how my brain works.  When I finally got up my nerve to tell my wife, Cari, about the rejection she said, “What did they say?  What was the reason for rejecting it?”

“I don’t know,” I said, “they didn’t really give one.  They said, ‘They appreciate the look’.”

“Appreciate the look?” she asked, “What does that mean?”

I told her I didn’t know what it meant.  She felt badly for me, but ultimately I felt that she was not really that surprised.  I mean, it’s pretty normal to get rejected on the first thing that you have ever offered up for publication.  It is probably pretty normal to get rejected a lot of times.  I read about people that have way more talent than I have that have worked for years and been rejected repeatedly.  Obviously, though, this is not what I thought would happen to me. 

 Cari could tell that I was taking this a little harder than perhaps I should be.  She said, “It’s okay, you just have to keep trying.  This was your first try.  What did you expect them to say?”

I told her that I kind of expected them to say something like, “Tell me you have more!”

And with this, Cari erupted into laughter as loud and hard as I have ever heard her laugh, and I started to laugh with her, too.  It was ridiculous.  I am not making this up.  In my head, I thought that once they got a taste of my particular brand of humor, my biggest problem would be producing enough material to keep up with demand.  I actually had daydreams of telling my boss how I was going to have to quit my job immediately and how I knew that it was going to be difficult to replace me, but this was of terrible importance that I free myself up to start producing the amount of fiction necessary to satiate my new found audience.  I also had nightmares that I would not be able to keep up with the workload, or that I would run out of witty things to say about the state of the world these days.  Well, I guess I can save that concern for another day.

I don’t know what this says about my character.  In all actuality, I am kind of afraid to know.  If you didn’t like me, you would probably say that I have delusions of grandeur or that I am really full of myself.  Maybe so.  I don’t think so, but someone with that affliction probably wouldn’t think that about himself.

I hope what it says about me is that I am an optimist, and maybe a little bit of a dreamer.  I can live with that.  I’ve been called worse.