A McSweeney's Kick In The Groin

Not such good news on the McSweeney's front. My most recent submission just got das boot. Again, the rejection came swiftly, exactly one week to the day I submitted. Nothing specific in the way of feedback, just the statement that it wasn't jam packed with laughs. I admit to feeling realy out of step with the website's zeitgeist.

The better part of me says to move on. After all, I have a completed novel that needs rejecting, and that's not going to happen on its own. We'll see.

Good Girl Down My Throat!

There was a 12-month stretch in my life when I took my rejection up close and personal while writing and  performing stand-up comedy. It was a huge moment of pride for me when I wrapped up my emcee duties for a local T.G.I.Friday's comedy night and was promptly handed a check for my services. It didn't even matter that the amount was paltry; just the fact that I had been paid to be funny was enough for me. I'm not so sentimental that I didn't cash the check, however.

I liked stand up for the challenge it posed. You're standing in front of a room full of strangers sans props or podium or PowerPoint presentation with only your wits and words to rely on. That having been said, it's a high risk/high reward endeavor. Having a bit go over just the way you envisioned it would when you wrote it at the kitchen table is a huge high, but that can be more than counteracted by the reaction (or lack thereof) of people who, from all outward appearances, wish you dead.

No matter. When you're starting out, it's all about racking up experience. That's exactly what I attempted to do while on a business trip to Seattle with some people from work. We were attending a database marketing convention (yeah, they're as fun as they sound) and had a free night before it started, so I picked up a copy of Seattle's free weekly (the Emeraldian or something) and found a coffee shop that was hosting a poetry slam that very evening. Our plan was to hit the slam where I would do a ten-minute set before we went out on the town to drink ourselves silly. After I compiled my set list and ran the material once in my hotel, we all piled into a cab. After a brief ride, we found ourselves in a charming little Seattle suburb.

The coffee house was exactly what you'd expect a Seattle-area java hut to look what with its quirky decor, walls littered with works from local artists, and comfy if not clean sofas and upholstered love seats. Better, it was also brimming  with brooding poets right out of central casting. I located the organizer of the event and promptly secured my spot. I When I got up there, I did my usual set--to complete silence, save my four friends who were so enamored of the idea that their co-worker was in front of them, mic in hand, riffing, that they laughed at everything I said.

When I was finished, I flopped down next to my friends and grabbed the beer they had waiting for me. I took a long pull just as a young lady who would soon become inextricably linked  to our trip took her place in front of the crowd and let loose a vitriol-laced rant against her father that was so intense that we immediately became uncomfortable for both her and ourselves. The gist of her tirade was that her father was one of those never good enough control freaks. Evidently, this really did a number on her psyche. She punctuated every observation of mistreatment suffered at the hands of her dad with the phrase "Good girl down my throat!"

But she didn't just say this phrase, she bellowed it. And she yelled it twenty times if she did so once. In a matter of minutes, the slam had transitioned from my attempt to instill some comedy to a field trip through someone's tortured childhood. It became increasingly difficult to tell if this was a poetry slam or group therapy session. We all breathed a sigh of relief when, mercifully, her performance came to an end.

The rest of the night was a blur, perhaps because the poetry all started to blend together as our empty beer bottle count grew. When it was all over, we got up to leave just as a young, attractive girl approached me, intrigued look on her face. I fully anticipated a compliment for my bringing some levity to an otherwise snooze/rage fest or, at the very least, a question about how long I had been doing comedy, where I usually performed, etc. What was going to make it all the more sweet was it would take place in front of all my buddies who were looking on.

"Excuse me?"

"Yes." Big smile.

"What you were doing up there..."

I nodded, knowingly.

"...was that like comedy or something?"

My buddies howled, and I was too taking aback to say anything other than "Yeah, it was."

"Oh," she replied and walked away.

We all thought it was pretty funny that my comedic efforts were lost on Seattle's finest amateur poets, and I chalked it up to a pretty memorable creative rejection. Even better was the "good girl down my throat" takeaway line that we all started saying entirely too often during our trip whenever we wanted to bust each other up. But the best part was when we were walking through the convention center on our last day of meetings and passed by none other than the angry poet herself. The badge around her neck confirmed that she was attending the same database marketing conference as us. My guess is that at the next slam, they screened all the out of towners.

Courting Rejection, Two At A Time

I'm upping the rejection ante by making a concerted effort to get more of my writing in front of people. As I write this, I have another McSweeney's Internet Tendency submission and a second literary agent query both hanging in the balance.

I'm pretty confident about the McSweeney's submission because I like the premise; it hits the quirkiness criteria that I think they have over there. This one went through more revisions than I usual, so I hope it retains the original spirit I started with. If this one makes the cut, I'll feel I've cracked their humor algorithm. If not, it's back to the white board, and I'm fresh out of pens.

As for the literary agent query, the odds say I haven't a shot. How many rejections does the average novel go through before finding a home:  50+? Still, there's no reason why this cat isn't the one who takes a chance on an up and coming writer with a kick-ass debut novel.

Regardless of what happens, the nice part about having more than one iron in the fire is that you don't dwell on them like you do with there's one and only. So, I'm letting the chips fall where they may, and just to be on the safe side, I think I'll research more literary agents before calling it a day.

Men's Health Rejection! (Reader Submission)

Yes, word of FlatOutRejected.com and the hilarity contained within its pixels has spread like wildfire and captured the hearts of creatives everywhere. As evidence, I present to you FlatOutRejected.com's first reader submission. Now aren't you ashamed that it wasn't you at the head of this line?

Without further ado:

I've been published in the Windy Hill Review, a publication of University Wisconsin Waukesha--a community college. The next step? Men's Health. I'll just bypass all those smaller publications who aren't worthy of my talent and target the big fish. Men's Health will welcome me with open arms--just like Gordon Gecko welcomed Bud Fox.

Like a good student of the game, I researched query letters and spent a good while crafting three paragraphs par excellence to the editor of Men's Health.

To my amazement, I got a quick, positive response.

What happened next is a blur. To this day I can't bring myself to read what I wrote. All I know is that there is a Men's Health folder on my computer with 13 drafts written over the course of two days. There's also the letter I wrote with the manuscript explaining that I could not meet the word count requirement I had set for myself. How embarrassing. In 13 drafts I couldn't cut out 600 words?

It took longer to receive the rejection than it did to get the go ahead to write the thing in the first place. Meanwhile, the Men's Health folder on my computer remains unmodified since November 19, 2003.

The Chipotle Stiff Arm

So if you've been kicking around this site at all, you might be wondering if I've ever been rejected by an entity other than McSweeney's Internet Tendency. Well, I have. In fact, my work has been summarily dismissed by none other than that burrito-making restaurant chain you know as Chipotle. When you're a true creative, you can't limit rejection to just a literary humor website. No, you have to cross over into something big, like the restaurant industry.

The rejection process started when one of those sneaky Chipotle employees slipped a promotional card into my burrito basket touting their customer website, MyChipotle, and a contest currently taking place thereon. The purpose of said contest was to create a short (like under 1 minute short) video that extolled the virtues of your favorite custom burrito.

The contest had been running for awhile, so you can imagine the amateur crap that had already been uploaded--things with kids dancing and spoofs of hip-hop videos (okay, one of those was actually not nauseating) and just lowest-common-denominator stuff. Normally, I don't fall for cattle call contests like this, but my buddy, Mike Alonzo, shoots videos in his sleep and was on board. Never underestimate the value of having a camera and editing tools available when shooting a video--the pen alone can only do so much. Plus, they got us with the super big cash prize (something like $10,000) for the winner. I went against my instincts on this one, and it cost me.

After my buddy and I kicked around some ideas, I wrote out a script that borders on the brilliant. Here's all you need to know:

1. Three roommates share an apartment.
2. One roommate wants to eat the other, who happens to be a cow.
3. The third roommate intervenes with the help of a delicious Chipotle vegetarian burrito.

So we have all the elements of a good story, here:  cannibalism, compassion, and Mexican food. We end up shooting this thing at the aforementioned Mike's house. He also handled the front-of-camera and editing chores, and we made full use of the amateur thespian skills of Time Barrow (hungry roommate), Jon Reily (compassionate roommate), and Destiny (cow). I was content to be the rarest of species:  a writer who's actually allowed on the set.

Here's what we did that day. Enjoy.

Rejected video

So right on deadline day I send the thing off, and those attorneys that Chipotle employs for circumstances such as this wasted no time in firing off this form rejection:

Hello, we’d like to thank you again for your submission to MyChipotle. Unfortunately, we can’t use it at this time for the following reason:
Video/Audio/Image contains profanity or nudity.

Because they didn't identify the actual culprit, I was forced to put on my attorney hat and figure out what in the video would scare me had I wasted three years of my life in law school. At first, I was genuinely confused. Nudity? What, the cow? And as far as profanity, we left all the "fuck you"s and "mother fucker"s that I had liberally populated the script with on the cutting room floor.

Then I realized that they must have taken issue with how we brandished the cleaver. I guess it just looks way too menacing when perched over the head of a docile cow mask. It's a good thing they didn't see the outtakes where we threw that sucker around the set with reckless abandon, laughing all the while.

I've had my stuff rejected for a lot of reasons, but this was the first time that it was due to my choice of cutlery. Lesson learned, Chipotle. Lesson learned.