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 None of the 27 editors to whom it had been submitted wanted it, and it has gone mercifully unpublished.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.

As per usual for me and Readercon, my Readercon experience didn’t begin at Readercon. Instead of flying to Boston and bussing it to Burlington, I flew to Providence for a morning with Paul Di Filippo and Deb Newton, which this year also meant some pre-con time with Liz Hand and Michael Dirda. We got a tour of the new Di Filippo/Newton castle and ate a Chinese/Thai lunch before heading out mid-afternoon.

Because programming wasn’t starting until 8:00 p.m., the afternoon and evening was spent in the usual lobby schmoozing followed by a massive dinner for 15 with me and Liz at the heads of the table (though I guess one of us was really the foot) and 13 others between us, including Howard Waldrop, Rose Fox, John Clute, Graham Sleight and many others.

But then—a quandary. My 9:00 p.m. reading was scheduled against one of the two panels I most wanted to see at the con, “The Influence of the Scott Meredith Literary Agency.” Luckily, there was a solution. I decided my iPhone had a sufficient microphone to record me reading solo, and yielded over my Flip camera to Paul Di Filippo so he could record the Meredith panel. Which meant I could be in two places at once.

And now, you can also be in two places at once.

So first, here’s my reading of “Things That Never Happened,” which will be out later this year or early next in an issue of Postscripts.

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I’ve been so busy recently—what with work, overnight visitors in our home nine of the past ten nights, and three barbecues in eight days—that I haven’t really had time to think about the fact that on Sunday at Readercon, I’ll get to see Laird Barron, Stephen Graham Jones, Jeff VanderMeer, or Karen Joy Fowler get stoned during the Shirley Jackson Awards ceremony for having written the Best Single-Author Collection of 2010. (As you can tell, I’m not terribly optimistic about my chances of winning for What Will Come After.)

But today I won something that reminded me of what’s coming up while at the same time putting it all in perspective—I won a reader. And a wildly enthusiastic reader at that, who wrote, not just a review, but a lengthy “unbarred squeeing session.”

Over on her blog, teenybuffalo had this to say, among other things:

I bought the book because I’d enjoyed one of his stories, “The Last Supper”, in a horror anthology I found at Arisia. It’s about the end of the zombie apocalypse. Edelman manages the difficult trick of being gentle and crushingly sad while writing a viewpoint character who has about one thought and two emotions. Chalk up another story for my small set of favorite zombie protagonists. It was enough to get me to buy his collection—all zombies, all the time. Nine pieces, all good, some brilliant. Of the stories, I’d select the title piece and “Live People Don’t Understand” as standouts. …

… as the introduction is keen to point out, Edelman was writing literary zombie mashups long before Pride and Prejudice and Zombies hit the shelves. I’d add that everything in the collection is a heck of a lot better-written and wittier than P&P&Z. Well, comparisons are odorous. These are damn fine stories.

And if you’d like to check out those “damn fine stories” for yourself, remember—now that PS Publishing has put out my collection as an ebook, you can be reading them in minutes. Here’s how.

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.

In October of 1981, I sent a short story titled “In the Kingdom of Eros” to Elinor Mavor of Amazing Stories, who rejected it three months later with a brief note scribbled on the back of the form reject below. The story, written in 1980, ended up collecting a total of 34 rejections before I retired it in 1991.

However …

“Eros and Agape Among the Asteroids,” a science fictional version of what started out a fantasy tale, was published in the anthology Once Upon A Galaxy in 2002.

I wrote an awful lot of poetry when I was a teenager. (Or should that be, a lot of awful poetry?) And for some reason, I often submitted it to women’s magazines.

I guess I thought there was a market there for the kind of sappy love poems teenaged boys write. In any case, whatever I was selling, no one was buying (either on the page or in the flesh).

Here’s what I got back when I sent a few poems to New Woman, a U.S. magazine which may or may not have had anything to do with the UK magazine of the same name.

I don’t think I ever received another form reject requesting that I supply my fee requirements in future submissions.

On February 20, 1974 (four months before I started on staff at Marvel Comics), I sent a script for an eight-page comic book story to Creepy, one of the magazines put out by Warren Publishing. The script, titled “When the Old Gods Die,” thankfully no longer exists, so it won’t be necessary for you to suffer through it.

The form rejection slip I received in return, however, has survived.

Back in the ’70s, I submitted poetry to many literary magazines such as The Paris Review and, of course, Poetry, but my favorite of these was The Little Magazine, which I discovered while still in high school. It featured contributions from writers like Tom Disch and Chip Delany, and though it wasn’t a science fiction magazine, it seemed to me that in its sensibilities and DNA, it was.

I never received back anything more than a rejection slip in response to my many submissions, but at least they were always personally signed by one of the editors.

Note who signed this particular form reject.

Wonder whatever happened to that guy?