Evil!

My friend Mark found last night via email that his short story was accepted by the Indiana Review. This is a big deal to a young writer, getting anything accepted is a big deal, but Indiana Review is high up the journal food chain and thus even sweeter. He sent them back a happy, ecstatic email and went to bed.

This morning he received a second email from them stating that there was some sort of glitch in their system and he'd gotten the acceptance email in error. His story was still under consideration (read: ha ha, sucker, never!) etc. etc. etc.

How evil is that? It could have been just an honest mistake, but there must have been some evil in there, somewhere down the line. Now Mark must pick up the pieces of his broken heart and trod wearily on. Welcome to writing!

4 comments:

Ben Parzybok said...

Ouch. That second letter of theirs better have been extremely kind.

David Oppegaard said...

I think it was. Just imagine if this was sent out to hundreds of desperate writers! Christ. All those late night phone calls of hapiness!

mm said...

Same thing happened with a college somewhere, I forget the name, but they sent out acceptance emails to students that they later had to 'unaccept'.

If anything, they should prep their system to send out a rejection email, instead of acceptance. I'd say it's a lot easier to handle a 'whoops, our mistake, you are really accepted' email then 'whoops, our mistake, you are probably not'.

Missy said...

What a drag. Not cool.

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