An author’s story of a humiliating self-own gets worse and worse as it goes along
US author, Mark Leidner, has shared an anecdote about the time he rejected his own story on behalf of a literary magazine, and it gets worse and worse as it goes along.
I once rejected my own short story from a magazine I was guest editing. The magazine had a blind submission policy, and I didn't recognize the story as my own and forgot I'd submitted it months before I was asked to guest edit the issue
— mark leidner (@markleidner) August 16, 2018
Thinking it was someone else’s, I hated it so much that I screen-shot several of its absolutely worst excerpts and posted them online in an attempt to shame the author and anyone else about to commit the same crimes
— mark leidner (@markleidner) August 16, 2018
Posting the screen shots made me feel confident in my writing and that I was smarter than the entitled fuckface who’d submitted the story. I then sent what I thought was an appropriately polite but harsh rejection only to receive the email myself and realize I wrote the story
— mark leidner (@markleidner) August 16, 2018
Before I was able to delete the screen shot, it had accumulated over 8K likes and 4K shares. Not only that, another post that had screen shot my post had over 75K shares and likes. I was able to delete my own post but not the one that had screen shot my screen shots
— mark leidner (@markleidner) August 16, 2018
Luckily no one that I know of discovered that the excerpts were from my own story. Ironically, the 12K new followers I’d gained in the subsequent weeks were instrumental in giving my agent the leverage to negotiate a seven figure advance for an otherwise unremarkable novel
— mark leidner (@markleidner) August 16, 2018
I’d been workign on. 6 months later, when I was revising that novel on a deadline for my editor, who worked for a major publisher, I realized with a shock that the entire novel was an expansion of the same short story I’d submitted and rejected, which I’d also forgotten
— mark leidner (@markleidner) August 16, 2018
In the middle of the novel was one, absolutely critical paragraph, and it had been lifted from the original short story. It was none other than the very excerpt I had chosen to post online as an example of unforgivable writing
— mark leidner (@markleidner) August 16, 2018
