I only had a chance to make a single submission to Hardware, which billed itself as “The Magazine of Technophilia.” I apparently ran out of time to make further submissions, because I now see that Hardware only published two issues.

I remember very little about the magazine, but it must have been a decent market, because I see it published contributions by Paul Di Filippo, Robert Frazier, Bruce Boston, Jonathan V. Post, and other names you’d recognize.

All I ever sent editor Jimm Gall was one poem titled “Friends,” no copy of which currently exists. The rejection slip below is all that remains.

I’m not sure exactly when I received this rejection slip from Charlie Ryan, because for some reason my records don’t reflect any submissions to Galileo. But since the magazine was only published from 1977-1980, there’s a very small window during which this could have been generated. Also, since I’d never have sent him a horror story, my possible submissions were few.

In any case, here’s another example of a rejection slips from a dead magazine that should allow all you writers out there to revel in some schadenfreude.

Charlie went on to publish Aboriginal, yet another of his magazines I never cracked. I liked Charlie, and remember fondly a number of Indian dinners we shared during the earlier days of Readercon.

There haven’t been any such meals in quite awhile as our paths no longer cross—he’s gafiated and is now the editor of The Willimantic Chronicle.

It’s been far too long since I last gave you an opportunity to feel some healthy schadenfreude by letting you lord it over a magazine that’s no longer with us. So here’s a new installment in my series of rejection slips from dead magazines, focused on a title from an editor whose name has become somewhat infamous since this slip was sent to me twenty years ago.

Back in 1991, I sent off a story titled “Apartment 6-D” to The Quarterly, edited by Gordon Lish. (Yes, Gordon Lish.) I haven’t reread that story in years, but as I think back on it, it seems from this vantage point that Lish was entirely right to reject it, showing far better judgment than the editor who eventually published it.

At the time, I was unaware (we were all unaware) of Lish’s heavy-handed editing of the early works of Raymond Carver. Now that the details are out, I’m no longer quite the fan I once was.

This remains, however, a masterful rejection slip.

I’d have shared a Science Fiction Age rejection slip with you long ago as part of this series if not for the fact that even though thousands of them passed through my hands during the eight years I edited the magazine (I was seeing 8,000-10,000 stories per year), I apparently didn’t save any for my records. So I had to wait for one of you to dig up a copy.

As you can see, it was certainly one of the wordier rejection slips out there.

Thanks to Brad Torgersen for taking the trouble to find this.

It’s been about a month since I last shared a rejection slip from a dead magazine with you, and I think it’s time you once more had a chance to … well … gloat.

Fantasy Book was good to me—I published two short stories with them (“Guinea Pigs” and “You Ain’t Just Whistlin’ Dixie“), though obviously not the one that got me this slip. (That story, “There Will Be No Miracles Today,” was eventually withdrawn from circulation, and has never never been—and never will be —published). In addition to those two acceptances, I was rejected 27 times, so I’d submited a total of 29 stories there, which meant that as I approached submission 30, it seemed like a magical number.

Why?

See, my first sale to Fantasy Book was the 10th story I submitted. I then thought I understood what the editor wanted, as we all do the first time we click, but no, I was rejected nine more times after that, only to sell them my 20th submission. (See the pattern?)

And then I was again rejected nine more times.

Back then, I thought—I get it—the editor will only buy every 10th submission from me. (Writers have strange superstitions.) So I was hopeful as I considered which story to shove in a manilla envelope for my 30th shot at a sale. But, alas, the magazine stopped publication, so I never had a chance to learn whether my superstition had any basis in truth.

By the way, if you think 29 a high number of submissions to any one market, far from it. Someday, when I have the time, I’ll do an exact count, but I’m pretty sure that there are a couple of magazines that I’ve submitted to 75 or more times … without a single sale.

Hope springs eternal.

I wrote “These Words Are Haunted” in 1983, and by the time I sent it off to Fantasy Tales in 1987, it had already been rejected 13 times.

Luckily, the story was eventually accepted by Weirdbook and was published in its Spring 1992 issue. I loved that title so much I also used it as the title of my first collection.

Gee, I wonder whatever happened to that Steve Jones guy?

I’d love to tell you details about The Asymptotical World, but I have no memory of the magazine at all … other than that I sent its editor/publisher Michael Gerardi half a dozen stories during the mid-’80s, selling him none of them.

Which means you won’t be learning anything today other than what I hope you’re learning with each installment in this series—to take some small comfort in the fact you’re still around … while these magazines that may have rejected you aren’t.

One lesson about the writing life I had to learn was that just because you’ve sold a story to a magazine, you haven’t left its rejection slips behind you. One example was The Twilight Zone.

I’d published “Fifth Dimension” in its April 1983 issue, back when Ted Klein was the editor, but when I sent “The Man Who Lost His Music”—originally written as a Clarion student in 1979—to then-editor Tappan King in 1987, here’s what I got back in the mail.

For what it’s worth, that judgement on “The Man Who Lost His Music” appears to have been correct. None of the 27 editors to whom it had been submitted wanted it, and it has gone mercifully unpublished.

It hasn’t been submitted in more than 20 years, and if I’m lucky, the manuscript no even longer exists.

On May 19, 1983, I sent my short story “Namestealer’s Journey” to Dragon magazine. I only submitted a few stories to that magazine while it was alive, because I tended not to write its particular brand of fantasy.

Here’s what I received back on June 21.

“Namestealer’s Journey” was eventually published in Lari Davidson’s magazine, Potboiler.

Whispers was one of the most respected horror magazines of the ’70s and ’80s, and I always hoped I’d someday submit something that would be found acceptable by editor and publisher Stuart David Schiff. Unfortunately, as with so many other wonderful magazines, Whispers ran out of somedays.

The story Stu passed on, “The Man Who Would Be Vampire,” was eventually purchased by Crispin Burnham and published in a 1988 issue of Eldritch Tales.