The Daily NO – Rejection #7

Today on The Daily No, it’s another first. The rejection we’ll be discussing today is my first ever personal rejection with actual feedback from an editor. It was a momentous occasion, and the first time I really felt like I was making actual progress. What’s interesting about this rejection is that it’s the also first time I encountered the following submission truisms. One, even good stories get rejected, and, related to that, two, not every good story is a good fit for every publisher/editor.

Quick disclaimer here. I feel it necessary to once again point out that these posts are NOT call-outs. I am absolutely not taking these publications and editors to task for rejecting my work. These stories were rejected because, as I said above, they weren’t a good fit for the markets and editors I sent them to. That’s it. Full stop.

Okay, with that out of the way, let’s take a look at today’s rejection.

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Rejection #7

• Story: “Night Games”
• Length: Short Story
• Genre: Horror
• Submitted: 2/2/13
• Rejected: 2/21/13
• Type: Personal rejection with feedback.
• Publisher: Allegory e-Zine
• Publisher Tier: Semi-pro

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Aeryn,

Thanks for letting us see “Night Games”.  I regret to say that it’s not right for ALLEGORY.

I loved the incredible vividness of this story, and thought the ending was rather awesome.  (Nothing like a vampire being staked with a baseball bat.)  However, the long digressions into baseball, while interesting and well written, really slowed the pace for me.  It ended up feeling like there was too much internal monologue for the bit of action the story provided.

Best of luck with this in other markets.

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There’s a lot to discuss with this one, but let’s break down the rejection first. It opens with the important business, which is whether my story was accepted or not. Then, the editor graciously told me WHY the story wasn’t a good fit for them and their market, while also praising the bits they liked. They ended the rejection with a standard boilerplate closing. Good rejection. Short, succinct, and sincere. A+

So, this was my first personal rejection and the first time I had received editorial feedback on a short story. At the time, I viewed this as a major accomplishment, even if I was disappointed about the rejection. The editor did an excellent job explaining why they rejected the piece, and was careful to include language like “for me”, which I appreciated.

I will say without hesitation that “Night Games” is one of the best stories I’ve written in the twenty-some years I’ve been doing this, but it has a couple of things working against it that made it kind of a tough sell. One, it’s a vampire story, and if you think shopping a vampire story is rough in 2025, you should have tried it in 2012 and 2013 when the pushback against vampires as a response to the glut of sexy blood suckers was in full swing. Two, it’s about baseball, and I mean REALLY about baseball. If you’re not a sports fan, then sections of “Night Games” are gonna feel very tedious. I go into a lot of detail about the minutiae of pitching, hitting, how the minor leagues work, and a bunch of other deep baseball topics, and for some folks (and editors), that’s just not gonna work.

“Night Games” racked up seven rejections before I sold it to Devilfish Review and again to Pseudopod. Two more of those seven rejections were similar in content and tone to the Allegory rejection above. So this story is a great example of why you should keep submitting work you believe in and that rejections are sometimes more about editorial taste and publisher fit than the quality of your work. Again, the editors that rejected “Night Games” weren’t wrong in doing so. They were absolutely right about the story not being a good fit for their publication. I just needed to find the story the right home, and I eventually did. 🙂

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Thoughts on this rejection? Tell me about it in the comments.