A Rant on Non-Response, or Response So Damn Slow it Might as Well Be a Non-Response

First of all, I’d like to thank most of the magazines/journals I’ve sent pieces to over the last year and a half or so. Because most of you respond as promptly and politely as you can, many of you even taking the time to respond personally and some of you even taking the extra time to include a little critique. Thank you, all of you, for keeping me sane and keeping me writing.

Now for the rant. This is not a rejection blog, so I don’t usually write about acceptance/rejection here. (I leave that to better, funnier writers like Roxane Gay. If you want to read a fantastic rejection blog, read hers.)

However. I would like to address a rant about non-responses to certain Very Important literary magazines. You know who you are. And I’d also like to rant about responses that take three thousand five hundred years. Because I’ve just checked Duotrope, and it would appear that I have no fewer than ten submissions that have been out for well over six months, with no response at all. Three of these have been unacknowledged for over a year. I’ve even queried two of these, and also received no answer to my query. And in the last three months, I have had responses from at least three magazines more than a year and a half after the date of submission.

Look, Very Important Literary Magazine Editors. I understand you must receive hundreds upon thousands upon billions of submissions per year. I understand that mine is just a tiny drop in the bucket of your literary diving pool, to mix metaphors rather patly. I understand that you are busy people, with busy lives, and jobs, and you are unpaid, and you like to spend several years reading each story to give it the respect it deserves before you reject it utterly. I understand that I do not run a literary magazine, have never run a literary magazine, and so I do not know what it is like to operate under the pressure you operate under.

But let’s be honest, shall we? When I look at your average on Duotrope, and see that your average acceptance time is one month, and my submission has been “under consideration” by you since Millard Fillmore’s inaugural celebration, I think we can both agree that my submission has really not grabbed you. In fact, I think we can further agree that my submission has almost certainly been rejected, probably quite some time ago. And if I were a normal person, I would probably  check the box marked “Lost/No Response” and move on.

However, while a dreadful cynic in everyday life, I have somehow ended up a literary optimist. And while there is no response, there is still hope for me, I have decided. I tell myself, clearly The Bumblefuck Review loves your story, and has been holding on to it for four hundred and seventy two days only because they want to read it over, and over, and over. Eventually, however, the editors will relinquish your masterpiece to the rest of the world, through publication and place of honor in their fine literary journal. So I tell myself.

Of course, this is absolute bullshit, and it would be awfully nice of you Important Editors to deny me this delusion, and to allow me to proceed to the grieving part of the process. You see, I can then fix my story, or trash it, or move it along, or do something other than obsessively check your magazine’s website to make sure that you haven’t suddenly folded or gone under in the last day or two.

At this point I’m sure you’re protesting, But of course we want to respond to you! And in timely fashion, too. We wish that we could. But as much as it pains us, we cannot do so because we are Just. Too. Busy.

And I want to believe you. I really do. And I know that you are busy. But (and it pains me to point this out) you do spend a lot of time on Facebook. And on your blog. And on your rather fancy-pants website. And Twittering.  And sending out emails about the contests you’re running or whatever. Now, I understand promotion.  I really do. I have a degree in Public Relations. I know you must get the word out about your magazine, especially in this era of Waning Reader Attention, or no one will read your fine product. I know this is true.

But. Is the essential function of your magazine not the reading and publishing of outstanding literature and poetry? Could you perhaps take a cue from even more understaffed publications and concentrate on this rather than Tweeting four hundred times a day? After all, if you can Tweet about your latest issue in twenty seconds, one would think you might manage to read and reject or accept a submission in under a year.  Or two years.

That is all. Oh, except for this: if you seriously are going to hold on to a piece you have no intention of accepting for a year and a half before you finally send me an anonymous, shameful little slip of crooked, Xeroxed paper to tell me you can’t respond personally but you’ve rejected my story–could you please state that on your website or in your magazine? Preferably in your submissions information? Because I won’t even fucking bother with you if that’s the case.

Rant done. Thank you for reading.