I got two rejection letters today from the same newspaper, and in the strange universe I live in, where success and failure are not governed by the laws of physics, this qualified as good news.
For months now I’ve been sending out fleets of articles to papers all over the country, only to see them fall into the black hole of editorial indifference. The black hole of editorial indifference, of course, is a force so strong that nothing, not even a rejection letter, can escape it. An article that falls into this black hole is doomed. Like Laika the Russian space dog, it’s on a one-way trip, and you’ll never hear from it again.
But the two articles that got sent back to me today, they’re Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. They planted flags in the alien landscape, left footprints, and came back to tell the tale. At the rate I’m going, there’ll be a Best Western on Mars before I actually get anything accepted by the editor in question, but I’m encouraged. Who knows; maybe if I can launch enough of my missives toward his desk, eventually the number of survivors will reach a critical mass--a colony, if you will--and he’ll find it easier to publish my stories than to keep sending them back to me.
The invasion has begun.