![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I got a story rejection, and the editor said if I wanted feedback, he could give it--because he was always bummed to send stories in someplace and then just get a no--but he didn't want to force it on me if I didn't want it.
My first instinct was to say thanks-very-much-but-no-thanks, but then I thought, What the heck? This is a story that has had only three readers--or rather, only three readers who talked to me about it (it's been out on submission to other places and gotten form rejections). Here's a reader--and an editor, to boot!--offering his reaction. Why not find out what he thinks? So I said yes, please, and thanked him for the generous offer.
And I was quite pleased, because he said he loved the characters and the pacing and the plot, just not the ending. He didn't like how the ending just ... happened... how things could have ended some other way, but happened to end this way, how close to much-worse it was, and yet it didn't end with everything fixed, either. He wanted a little more, he said.
And that kind of pleased me too, because the thoughts he had, the feelings he had, were exactly what I wanted to leave a reader with--so, yay! I did the thing! But boo, too, because it was an experience that was dissatisfying for him. I'll muse on that a bit.
Sometimes you can try to bake a cake and you forget baking powder, and it comes out like a brick. Then, if someone tells you, "If you add baking powder, this will be much more light," you can do it, and yay! Proper cake.
Other times you make a cake--let's say a lemon cake--and the person says, "this is a great cake, but it's lemon flavored, and I prefer cakes that are chocolate or vanilla flavored." Then your question is, does all the world prefer chocolate and vanilla, or are there lemon-cake fans out there?
To continue talking in metaphor-eeze, I hope someone out there will like lemon cake and will decide to serve it up for people to eat, and that there will be many happy eaters of lemon cake. One day!
My first instinct was to say thanks-very-much-but-no-thanks, but then I thought, What the heck? This is a story that has had only three readers--or rather, only three readers who talked to me about it (it's been out on submission to other places and gotten form rejections). Here's a reader--and an editor, to boot!--offering his reaction. Why not find out what he thinks? So I said yes, please, and thanked him for the generous offer.
And I was quite pleased, because he said he loved the characters and the pacing and the plot, just not the ending. He didn't like how the ending just ... happened... how things could have ended some other way, but happened to end this way, how close to much-worse it was, and yet it didn't end with everything fixed, either. He wanted a little more, he said.
And that kind of pleased me too, because the thoughts he had, the feelings he had, were exactly what I wanted to leave a reader with--so, yay! I did the thing! But boo, too, because it was an experience that was dissatisfying for him. I'll muse on that a bit.
Sometimes you can try to bake a cake and you forget baking powder, and it comes out like a brick. Then, if someone tells you, "If you add baking powder, this will be much more light," you can do it, and yay! Proper cake.
Other times you make a cake--let's say a lemon cake--and the person says, "this is a great cake, but it's lemon flavored, and I prefer cakes that are chocolate or vanilla flavored." Then your question is, does all the world prefer chocolate and vanilla, or are there lemon-cake fans out there?
To continue talking in metaphor-eeze, I hope someone out there will like lemon cake and will decide to serve it up for people to eat, and that there will be many happy eaters of lemon cake. One day!
