Those dreaded words, 'however', 'unfortunately', 'I'm afraid', 'alas' …

“Dear Rod

Thanks for your proposal on the above title [Cracking China]. The sample you sent is very interesting and entertaining and I enjoyed reading it. However, it is not suited to our area of publishing. As a university press, we do focus more on academic texts rather than popular ones … ” (What’s wrong with fast-selling popular titles to broaden your market and increase profit?)

“Dear Rod,

Thanks very much for submitting your proposal for Cracking China. This is a very appealing project, well written and immediately engaging. I would love to take it further. Unfortunately, I am leaving [the publishing house] …” (Murphy’s Law!)

(The above editor then went on to recommend another publisher he was convinced would be interested in Cracking China, but that publishing house had already rejected the Cracking China proposal sent via email in two days flat, no reason given.)

“Dear Rod,

Thank you for submitting Cracking China to the … Agency. Unfortunately, we are not able to represent you. You write well and many of your anecdotes are entertaining but in the end I couldn’t quite decide if you were writing a memoir or armchair travel [aren’t they often flip sides of the same coin??] …”

“Dear Rod,

Many thanks for your submission and apologies for the delay. I’m afraid I won’t be offering representation for [your novel] Flowers on Sappho’s Grave. It just isn’t quite what I am looking for, although the setting is wonderful and the plot is intriguing.” (Well, what more does a reader want than an intriguing plot and a wonderful setting?)

“Hi Rod,

Thank you very much for this submission, which is very entertaining indeed. Alas, this is not the type of novel that will easily fit my list, not least because it will compete with one I recently sold to Penguin. It’s a nice idea and I certainly wish you well with this.”

Sob. I was going to write an essay on rejection. But I found myself thinking about Ezra Pound’s famous poem, In a Station of the Metro: “The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough.” The poem is perhaps more famous for its imagistic editing. It was initially thirty lines, and Pound chiseled it back to fourteen words. So I will try and keep my whinge on rejection brief.

I would, however (here’s my however), like to quote the infamous rejection Joseph Heller received for Catch 22:

“I haven’t really the foggiest idea about what the man is trying to say. It is about a group of American Army officers stationed in Italy, sleeping (but not interestingly) with each others’ wives and Italian prostitutes, and talking unintelligibly to one another. Apparently, the author intends it to be funny — possibly even satire — but it is really not funny on any intellectual level. He has two devices, both bad, which he works constantly … This, as you may imagine, constitutes a continual and unmitigated bore.”

Catch 22, as we all know, nevertheless became a huge bestseller and introduced a new phrase to the English language. John Grisham and Deepak Chopra, among many others, both got so fed up with rejections that they published their own books and sold them privately. Then publishing houses took notice and the rest is history — for them. Oops, I am starting to write that essay on rejection, but wish to think about it for another blog.

For now, like Pound, I prefer to whittle back my current remarks on getting my various manuscripts (all five of them) rejected to one word:

Onward.