From: mdhangton@gmail.com   
      
   On Saturday, September 13, 2014 8:59:59 AM UTC-4, Kevin C wrote:   
   > On Wednesday, September 10, 2014 3:42:29 PM UTC-4, William Vetter wrote:   
   >    
   > > The reason I said "how many published" was that Kevin seemed to believe   
   that this was preventing him from getting his ms. accepted.  I've looked over   
   the complete and incomplete mss. on my hard drive (and they weren't published)   
   and I think about 30    
   to 40% somehow suggest science-fictional in the first sentence, though I have   
   a novel where the POV character is an alien that doesn't.   
   >    
   >    
   >    
   > I think it's an inability to learn to blame for lack of publication. Setting   
   the scene issue was just one fault of many.   
      
   I will tell you something like what Julie said about Readers/Critiquers.   
   10 or 12 years ago in online workshop Critters, some random woman read one of   
   my manuscripts.  And what I got from her was more or less   
      
   Your manuscript has a question mark in it.  Editors do not read manuscripts;   
   they scan them for question marks.  As soon as they see your question mark,   
   they will throw it in a reject pile.   
      
   Of course, this is so absurd that it's impossible.  But this lady was quite   
   serious in her belief.  So I spent a bit of time thinking about this, and I   
   figured that it's a sort of defense mechanism where she blamed the rejection   
   slip on some rule rather    
   than consider the fear that her core beliefs or the emotions she infused the   
   ms. with were rejected.   
      
   So that's my platitude.  Really, you usually never know why these guys reject   
   you.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)