So this rejection caught me by surprise. It ended up in my spam folder, so I didn’t see it until a while after it was sent on 5/28/2026. This is the same story that is more salient now than it was when I originally wrote it.
This time, the rejection is personalized. Granted, this market does everything in their power to personalize every rejection, which is so much work, and I cannot thank them enough for this.
“We enjoyed the premise and your writing but wanted to see the central plot defined slightly closer to the beginning of the story.”
For me this is huge. This is something I can work on without gutting the story. I can massage it to meet that expectation, and I can send it out again. The other part of this rejection that helps me in my journey is the note that the person sending the rejection is the “first reader.”
This tells me that my story didn’t get past that first reader. While that isn’t necessarily good news, it does give me a sense of where my story fell for them. And that helps me keep moving forward with my work and revision.
Note on letter images: I have here and will always black out the name of the market and the name of the person who sent the letter. These posts are not meant to speak about the publications at all. These are about my reactions to the letters and what I can learn from them.
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