It’s been more than four years since I added to my set of rejection slips from dead magazines, which I began so struggling writers could feel a sense of schadenfreude.

That is:

Those magazines are gone … but we’re still here.

Earlier this week, while digging out my first rejection from Analog—which wasn’t a form, so it can’t be included as part of this collection—I came across another, so decided it was time to share one more.

Oui was an adult magazine that also published fiction, and since many of my favorite science fiction writers published in those sorts of magazines at the beginnings of their careers—Robert Silverberg in Rogue, Harlan Ellison in Gent, and Avram Davidson in Swank, for example—I thought: Hey, why not me?

But it was not to be.

Oui started up in 1972, sent me this rejection some time during the late ’70s, and put out its last issue in 2007.

I’m not saying things would have ended differently for them had they bought that story of mine … but you never know.