Sam Downing

First up, two unrelated things: coffee is so good; Vegemite on toast is so good.

The Rejectionist held a contest recently to write the most amazing form rejection letter in the history of the universe, and the winner is a truly astounding cavalcade of LOLs. A sampling:

Please don’t be offended. Your query’s horrendous.
We can’t understand why you’d bother to send us
a missive so deeply in need of an edit
we wanted to vomit as soon as we read it.
Its hook was insipid, its grammar revolting,
its font microscopic, its manner insulting,
its lies unconvincing, its structure confusing,
its efforts at comedy less than amusing.
We think that on average the writing is better
in comments on YouTube than inside your letter.

That’s gold, Jerry! The complete opus is here. I reckon most writers would be pretty chuffed with a rejection like this.

The main character in my book is a vampire. I started writing said book in around 2005 (from an idea that first came to me in the late ’90s), back in the day when vampires weren’t totally off the cultural radar, but you probably had to be a Buffy fan to care much about them.

Fast-forward to 2009, when my book is finally done, and vampires are everywhere.

I kinda thought this might pose a dilemma. Like, I’d submit my book to an agent who’d be all, “Oh, jeez, another bloody vampire novel. Pass me a form rejection letter.” I was so concerned about this that when I wrote my first query letter, I tried to write around the fact that my book included a vampire by not mentioning the vampirism at all.

Yeah, that didn’t turn out so great.

Eventually I just laid out the vampire-ness of it all in the query’s first paragraph. So what if it’s yet another book about a vampire? My protag isn’t anything like the vampers dominating pop culture right now. Hopefully that’ll work in my favour when I’m ready to start querying.