WRITING/SUBMITTING/HOPING

The letters started coming across the internet. Someonein one of my writer’s loops was depressed. After almost a year of waiting to hear back from an editor who had her manuscript, she received the package in the mail with a form letter rejection. “But I spoke to her,” this writer said. “She said I had passed the first level and it looked good. Now they won’t even tell me why I was rejected.”

She wasn’talone. For days the letters arrived in my mailbox. Someone else had a manuscript sitting...