Quite a number of you have encouraged me to stop writing for free and to hie myself hither and thither to a magazine. A few of you have also pegged that maybe I have had some past bad experiences in the trade...well, shall I go on?

There used to be a shit rag on the racks lo back in the early 80s called Twilight Zone Magazine. (I think you can see where we’re headed right away…) The fiction in there was terrible. The large majority of the stories were rewrites of Stephen King stuff, backwards, forwards, anacrosstic. Maybe the worst one ever was about, like, this girl, and she kept disappearing from, like school, y’know? And ‘nother girl like followed her and she was always standing around at fires? And it was ‘cause it proves she was a fire un-starter, and she was going round helping people, by psi-dissing the fires, ‘kay?

Okay, I’m being ungenerous. The shit I wrote at fifteen wasn’t so good either. But those stories selected for Twilight Stoned were so godzillaawful that you thought, hey, maybe you could do one.

Back in the day, I was stuck with a Smith-Corona. I’m a horrible typist. I make a mistake about every six characters. (I just wrote “hirrible” “abot” and “sx.” And I put “use” for “just.”) This has been the same way since 1979. Imagine having to whip out the white-out for every error, waiting for it to dry, and then retyping.

Typing up a short manuscript was agony.

So I’d send this shit off to Twi-Night Double-Header and wait. Oh, six weeks. Or six months. Or a year.

When they came back, it looked like T.E.D. Klein had fucking been making pastrami sandwiches on them, or using them as flak jackets. (I just put “it” for “they” on the second word in that sentence. Imagine having to redo the whole sentence: or start over. Fucking Smith-Corona.)

Well, those stories I scratched out were bad. As bad as anything T.E.D. Klein ever wrote. And I know that Gus Mailman is as much to blame as Carol Serling or whatever for those treaded-up returns. But after all this—after all those dozens of tardy stinking form rejection slips—I started to craft a personal animus against Swinelight Boner the Mazagine. When it went out business, I had a private party.

Over the next few years, I gave up on T.E.D. Bundy but made other freshman errors. My writing got really good in the meanwhile, but I was still butting my head. I was sending shit out to real private parties that don’t really want your business, like Playboy. I sent stuff out to entirely the wrong markets, thinking somebody might grope for it. Well, when you are nineteen, you think your star is rising—you’re the motherfucking Rhinestone Cowboy.

Then my Dad died and my Mom was already paralyzed from a stroke. I was twenty-one. I needed money badly. I started writing and sending out shit aggressively, everywhere, trying to get one goddam sale to help out.

I wasted a lot of effort and postage trying to sell picture books. I tried floating three chapters and a proposal letter and thinking maybe somebody would bite, and then I could write the rest of the book, lickety split. That got nowhere. The worst, snobbiest, vilest publisher? Viking Press, hands down. Viking can lickety my split—I’m a boy, the one in the back.

Like the rest of the kids in the Stephen King Paperback generation, I thought my calling would be Horror. I was writing Lovecraft pastiches before it was a boom industry. I was tapping out nauseatingly vivid tales before splatterpunk became a do.

Over and again, I got near hits. “I really liked this but” and “almost a sale” started showing up in chicken-scratchery on the edges of form rejections. What nearly sold? My nightmares. I’d write them down, nearly unretouched. (I have nightmares that look just like movies, complete with snappy dialog and pop songs whose lyrics and music don’t actually exist. Even now; I just had a teenage werewolf dream last week that came complete with a new tune called “Extra Sexual Nerves.”)

So anyway, I dreamed when I was nineteen that I was a stalker-killer who ran afoul of a strange religious cult when they inducted my idée-fixe (“Seven Down, Seven Down”) or of a cabinet found on an island that leads to an evil Platonic World of Ideas (“Things Found in the God’s Room”).

Almost…

The hostility of some publishers is awesome. I never got a “you suck” scrawled on my manuscript, but the assholes at Highlights actually sent a form rejection slip that said something of “every submission is like entering a contest and yours didn’t win because it was not as good as others.” A guy I used to correspond with told me he wrote a strange story and an editor sent him a “we don’t need your kind of work, pervert.” I wish I had gotten that one; that almost seems like a badge of honor.

My worst young experience? I sent a story in to a horror magazine. The editor was a pretty well known toff named Alan Rodgers. It came back after a loooong time with this heart-pounder of a note: I really like this, unfortunately this magazine is folding. I’m moving over to a new magazine, and if you send it there, I’d really like to publish it.

My hands were shaking. I was still in my young twenties. This. Was. It. I scrabbled together a package and a nice letter referencing his communiqué and sent it off to Night Cry (I think was the name of the mag.)

It came back about two weeks later, like motherfucking T.E.D. was making pastrami sandwiches on it.

With a form rejection letter.

Know what? After all these years, the Internet has brought some justice to me:

Fuck you, Alan Rodgers. Why don’t you roll up a copy of Night Cry real tight and…

What is the import here? Why am I so angry? Because this could have justified my existence. This could have brought me justice. This could have been the beginning of a resume, the first break, that would have meant that I could have, quite casually, said, “I’m a writer. No, a real one.”

This could have been the beginning of a career, could have probably given me not much money, but a lot of wind in my sails. It could have buoyed my confidence, could have shown me that my writing had value outside of my own head. No, I couldn’t have saved my mother’s life, but she might have had a better final two years. I might have been a million stars away from the desperations between, from the hungers of my now.

This is what that form rejection means to me, what all of them meant to me, but this one in particular.

Isn’t it frightening to know what stories are on the other end of the mail? What a difference, maybe, that one thing could have made.

Eventually, I gave up. I later almost placed a short story at Esquire. That was it for me. I got tired of running alongside, smelling the locomotive’s breath. Curse, karma or being outside the slipstream of the zeitgeist, it was never meant to be my time.