Isn't it great when you wake up to all the Hollywood intimations of a good day: sun shining, birds chirping, eyes opening of their own accord? Not when you sit down to the computer to work on your soon-to-be Pulitzer-prize-winning novel only to discover a rejection email.
Emailed rejections leave so much less room for hope. I mean, at least with a slip of paper, you get to see whether they wrote a bit of encouragement or signed their initials, or, on the far end of the spectrum, bent the corner of the slip stuffing it into the envelope posthaste so they could get your crappy story out of their life.
An email reveals nothing.
Unless, of course, it is one of those ones where the editor gives you vague feedback that makes you feel almost worse than getting a form rejection. But then you feel almost worse than getting a form rejection.
The normal email rejection is quite coy, refusing to reveal whether it is sent to every poor schmuck that submits accounts of their dreams from the night before or only to the "next tier"-- those whose stories the journal actually took seriously for a second before some unknown factor made them frown, or yawn, or cringe. I've found myself searching through backlogs of emails for the previous rejection to compare the wording. And it's pretty much always the same.
Since it is much easier to click on an automated rejection email than to go in and type a few words directed to the individual, it makes sense to assume that fewer stories warrant an abberration from the form rejection. On paper, however, editors will sometimes scrawl their names, and occasionally even a quick "thanks!" Maybe this allows them to give more hope than is necessary, but I live off that hope like a vampire lives off of blood.
So far, the online submission format is leaving me anemic and thirsty.
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