Friday, August 10, 2007

friday confession: what an idiot

I just looked at the cover letter I sent to a journal with a submission in May. There I was pasting in a sentence about where I've been published and I notice the sentence begins "You published my poem 'Tralala' last year and I have also had poems in A, B and C." Groooooaaaaan. This journal didn't publish my poem. I pasted the sentence in from a letter to another journal that did.

oh, jeezus. I am resigning as my agent.

12 comments:

Charlene D. said...

oh no! Stuff like that just makes you crazy, doesn't it?

SarahJane said...

something beyond crazy that I'm trying to pinpoint.

Andrew Shields said...

I sent poems to Southwest Review once with the cover letter addressed to Southern Review. Ouch.

But as C. Dale has pointed out a couple of times, that's nothing on what he sometimes sees!

SarahJane said...

You've got a pretty good chance, though, that even they didn't notice that... smile

Rachel Mallino said...

Sarah, I don't mean to laugh, but that is just damn funny. You might as well send them an email and make a big joke out of it. At least, that's what I would do, but I seem to care much less than most.

=P

SarahJane said...

yes, it is kind of funny,
unless you're me.
i have now drawn even more stupid attention to myself by apologizing...
I have now learned my lesson and will now be setting each cover letter together individually in typeface on a printer's block in the cellar.
sarah, forgiving herself

Valerie Loveland said...

Maybe they won't remember they didn't publish "Tralala" and will think A, B and C are real magazines.

SarahJane said...

Hee! not to make this worse than it is - the letter didn't actually say "Tralala," though that would be an interesting name for a poem, nor did it say A, B and C. I used the real names of journals.... where I really have been published, I might add... though this could be the beginning of a brilliant career in lying

Leslie said...

I once did the copy/paste thing and forgot to change the name of the journal in the concluding paragraph. I got everything else right, but in the end said that I hoped the editor found these poems suitable for someone else's journal.

He sent a very snarky letter back saying he was quite taken with the poems but wasn't sure, in the end, that I'd meant to send them to his journal so he was rejecting them.
arggggg.
I laugh now, but it made me craaaazy then.

SarahJane said...

That is snarky. I hope he made some atrocious error of his own soon after. hee.

Leslie said...

Me to. But it did make me take care sending out whole batches of poems, and it made me promise myself I'd be kinder about other people's mistakes. Even his.

As for yours, forgive yourself, laugh and move on. The poems in question will surely find a home, if not there then somewhere better.

michi said...

it is funny, but i can see how it would make me want to hide under a blanket and, um, at least pretend to be dead for about half a year. ;)

but it happens, doesn't it? i have to be sooo careful when i send out several subs in one day, i always check a million times and then wonder why it takes me 6 hours to submit to three journals. :)

tralala. *g*

m

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