From The Desk of Mr. Evil
(or How to Make Enemies and Anger People)

by Kealan Patrick Burke

Mr. Writer awoke one morning, compelled to find a home for his latest vampire story “I Was A Teenage Copycat.” After perusing the local market listings, his roving finger alights upon what he perceives to be the perfect sanctuary for his homeless tale. The market is called, “Werewolf, There Wolf!”

In some enclave of reason locked away deep in his subconscious, Reason doth protest that this market seeks werewolves, not vampires. In fact, it whispers from afar, it specifically asks that writers refrain from sending fiction of the generously toothed and siphoning kind, but Reason goes ignored.

The money is good, you see…

Mr. Writer nods, satisfied that his story stands an excellent chance of cracking this particular market because the tale is so damn good it will not matter that it features vampires. In fact, it might concern circus clowns for all the difference it makes. He knows the editor will forget himself and all he has learned to publish Mr. Writer’s story.

So he prints his story out on cheap paper, using both sides and reducing the font to 10-point Garamond single-spaced.

There. Not an ounce of ink wasted, not a page of paper squandered.

He refrains from putting his name and address on the upper left hand corner of the title page and the word count and copyright notices on the right. Why bother? All of this information is in the cover letter. He figures if the editor likes the story enough (and he will), he can get all the details he needs from that.

So into the envelope the story goes. Our esteemed Mr. Writer has taken the time to staple the pages together, a makeshift binding he is sure the editor will appreciate. After slipping the all-important cover letter in with the submission, he wonders if a Stamped, Self Addressed Envelope is really all that necessary. He shakes his head. How forgetful he is being! The information, including his e-mail address, by which any editor worth his salt in these modern times can respond, is in the cover letter!

Tsk, tsk, thinks he.

He seals the envelope and toddles off to the post office.

Cut to two months later.

Mr. Writer is more than a little worried. In fact he has transcended worry and chewed all his pencils down to twigs.

He has checked his e-mail daily and there has been no response from Mr. Editor. Mr. Writer finds this most odd, most irritating. It is obvious Mr. Editor has forgotten how to be a professional.
After all, in their market guidelines, it says they promise a maximum response time of two weeks. Two weeks!

After a few hours spent seething, Mr. Writer resolves to write a letter to Mr. Editor berating him for his tardiness and lack of respect for Mr. Writer’s hard work.

To his surprise, he receives a reply within an hour.

And what started as frustration becomes outright rage.

The professional writers among you will be smiling and nodding your understanding by now. Others will be sympathizing with poor Mr. Writer and his unfair treatment at the hands of Mr. Editor.

The professionals may be excused.

The rest of you need to listen and listen carefully because as the comic line goes: “I vill say zis only vonce.”

Magazines both print and online usually spell out what they want to see in the guidelines section of their publications. This is not limited to content; style and format are also included and it is important that these rules be followed if you want to have your story looked at and not tossed immediately into the wastepaper basket.

There are only two reasons you might find a website/magazine that does not include guidelines for formatting your manuscript:

(a) It is a professional publication and they assume you already know or

(b) They don’t know how to format either and should be avoided like the proverbial plague.

It might seem obvious to some, but formatting your story and adhering to the guidelines can make the difference between acceptance and rejection. Even the next Faulkner, King, Steinbeck or Oates will be dismissed unread if the story isn’t laid out correctly. Obvious yes, but you’d be horrified to learn how many submissions I have returned unread because they amounted to little more than pages of microscopic words in the wrong font and without indentation and double-spacing between the lines(which should be either Times New Roman or Courier 12 point. Most editors prefer the latter). Don’t bind your pages and use only one side. To keep your pages together, use a paper clip.

“But how was I supposed to know all that?” is not a viable excuse either. Every budding writer should study the necessary formatting required if they intend to submit to a market. There are plenty of writer resource sites and books that have detailed instructions on layout and people to advise you if they don’t.

Ignoring such information is only shooting yourself in the foot. Your story might be an award winner but no one will ever read it if you don’t show them you care enough to adhere to their guidelines.

Contact information is critical too. Mr. Writer’s excuse was that everything the editor needed to know was contained in his cover letter.

Too bad.

75% of editors don’t read cover letters; in fact, some guidelines actively discourage them. Yes, the truth is out. Most of your sweet “I am Budding MacWriter, hear me roar!” letters become coasters as soon as they’re opened. Sorry, but the editor is not going to be publishing your cover letter. He wants the story and if it’s the best thing he’s read in months, he doesn’t want to have to sift through the mountain of garbage on his desk to find out how to contact you. He wants to be able to flip back to the first page and see it there on the top left hand corner.

A simple rule, but also a frequently forgotten one. I have received submissions with no contact information at all on the letter. What does one do in such situations? Faced with a pile of 300 stories awaiting mine eye, the only solution is to dump the story and hope the writer learns a lesson.

At this point it should be noted that while the majority of these errors are the trademark of new and inexperienced writers, more than a few professionals frequently test the patience of editors by cutting corners. A wiser breed, they’ve run the gauntlet, and there is no excuse at all for such amateurish omissions.

But back to the venerable if somewhat ill-informed Mr. Writer.

You can imagine that the letter he received from the evil Mr. Editor was not an encouraging one.

But why? Because he didn’t bother to format his story?

Yes, partially, but more importantly the lack of formatting and the ill-fitting theme of Mr. Writer’s story (he sent a vampire yarn to a werewolf magazine) shows nothing but his utter disdain for Mr. Editor and his publication. It shrieks: “I don’t care who you are or what kind of stories you like. My story kicks considerable quantities of rump and you need to publish it.”

The lesson here of course is simple: Know your market.

Here’s an example for you, culled from my own experience.

Last year I edited an anthology of stories based in taverns. They could take the form of romance, crime, mystery, horror, western; I didn’t care, as long as a bar featured in the story. One day I received a submission from a very well known author and the story was exceptional. There was only one problem.

There was no tavern in the story.

Luckily enough for both writer and editor, we were able to work this out and the story was rewritten. But this was a rare case. Ordinarily, the story would have quickly found its way to the bottom of the barrel and stayed there to be laughed at by some caretaker at three in the morning.

Know your market.

If a magazine is called Embroidering for Llamas, don’t send them a story about your trip up a snowy mountain where you discovered your inner self. They won’t care and your name will remain in their brains as someone who didn’t care about them.

Just as important perhaps is that you not sit down and write a story about a farmer who struggles with his land but overcomes the odds at the end and buys a llama with a penchant for drop stitching. READ THE GUIDELINES. Find a fresh angle and weave a story around what you know the market is looking for. Be creative.

Let us now check back in with our erstwhile scribe Mr. Writer…

“How dare he!” Mr. Writer fumes, his hands trembling.
After punching some holes in the walls, he sits down before his computer and hits ‘reply’ to the obnoxious e-mail. He types:

Dear Knucklehead:

It is painfully obvious that you don’t know good fiction when you see it and may quite possibly need a crash course in English yourself if your rude and woefully error-strewn letter is anything to go by…

Is Mr. Writer justified in writing such a letter?

Of course not.

All he has managed to achieve with this letter is a guarantee that his work will never again be welcome at the publication he has chosen to berate.

As an editor, I have received letters similar to the above but usually brimful of coarse language and remarks about my mother. These days, I ignore them but in the beginning it was enough to make me want to never edit again.

The job of an editor is a thankless one and you make more enemies than friends. After all, you deal in souls. Every story that crosses your desk is a piece of someone and when you reject it, the more insecure writers think you’re rejecting them rather than their work. Some react defensively, others thank you for the constructive criticism and promise to try again, something I always encourage.

The point here is that everyone from Nora Roberts to Mr. Everything I Write Is Goldberg has faced rejection at one time or another. It should not be viewed as a kick in the ego (though it is of course disappointing) but rather a way to learn how to avoid the same mistakes in your work next time around.

I am an editor, but I am also a writer and I value rejection letters when the editor has taken the time to comment on why he didn’t like my work. Sometimes you’ll be lucky and get an editor with the time and the interest to show you where you went wrong (in his opinion – remember each editor has different tastes) and how to fix it. Other times, you’ll get a form rejection with a “Thank you, try again!” typed on it.

Whatever the case, NEVER give up. If you’re the type of person who can toss down their pen or leave the keyboard with a vow never to write again after you get a rejection, then maybe you SHOULD never write again, or at least not SUBMIT again. The world of a professional writer requires thick skin. You will run up against egomaniacs and backstabbers as much as you will the helpful and kind folk. For every person who tells you you’re brilliant, simply brilliant dahling! you’ll meet ten who’ll tell you your work is worthless, appalling and a waste of good paper.

True writers learn from their mistakes.

Everyone else packs up and leaves.

Which one are you?

© Kealan-Patrick Burke, 2003

Kealan Patrick Burke was born in the small coastal town of Dungarvan in the south of Ireland. A qualified journalist, he didn't start submitting his genre efforts until moving to the States in September 2001.
Since then he has had work appear in over fifty print and web-based magazines; including: Horrorfind, Wicked Hollow, The Palace of Reason, Would That It Were and Gothic.Net. His story "The Number 121 to Pennsylvania" will appear in an upcoming issue of Cemetery Dance magazine and "Outside" will appear online in Necropolis magazine.
His work appears or is due to appear in the upcoming anthologies: Verte Brume: The Anthology of Absinthe, The Book of Final Flesh, Vicious Shivers, The Fear Within, Asylum 3: The Quiet Ward, Shivers 2 and Masques 5.
Kealan also edited the anthologies: TAVERNS OF THE DEAD, featuring stories by such luminaries as Peter Straub, Ramsey Campbell, Neil Gaiman, David Morrell & Charles L. Grant (Cemetery Dance Publications) and BRIMSTONE TURNPIKE (Cemetery Dance Publications). He is currently editing QUIETLY NOW: A TRIBUTE TO CHARLES L. GRANT (Borderlands Press) and NIGHT VISIONS 12 (Subterranean Press).
He can be contacted at: elderlemon2003@aol.com or visit him online at www.kealanpatrickburke.com.