Third refusal
The refusal came on Monday, by a terse email.
After carefully reading your manuscript entitled Les Mailles sanguines, the reading committee of the editions... did not select it for publication.
Nevertheless, we wish you the best of luck with our colleagues and thank you for having entrusted us with your manuscript.
Respectfully,
I did not announce it right away, not out of embarrassment, but out of modesty. I also wanted to understand better what would happen to me. No one likes failure, and even less me who had an easy life on this side. If the next few hours were troubled, I slowly lifted my head up.
I know that my manuscript (typescript stubbornly says my former editor, for the sake of conformity with reality) must be reworked. I have already reread, sometimes rewritten 24 of the 81 chapters. I am surprised by my patience and happy to see that I am not discouraged anymore. I took time to write Les Mailles sanguines, I was vague in time, I experienced something else. If you don’t write every day, your fingers and ideas fall asleep. It is like the body that we leave to comfort.
These refusals force me to cool my eyes, to symbolically become a publisher, someone who has read a lot and who no longer surprises himself for much.
And if I always look up, it is because 1) yes, I am obstinate, 2) this text reflects my soul, the characters reveal the most intimate corners of my life, and I must, therefore, go all the way. That’s it, the worst thing that can happen to all of us is to give up along the way.
Of the three refusals received, I prefer the second, that of the big publishing house, which was the only one to tell me a little something and which asks me to come back to them once the text has been reworked.
As for the other two, they obviously owe me nothing, but I find them lazy as hell, or cautious. Since you are a publisher, have courage, do not hesitate to hurt the authors with the sword of your opinions. You’re probably right and wrong, it doesn’t matter. However, it is not by remaining politically correct that you will raise the level of literature here. Otherwise, if you persist like this, it means that you are only bureaucrats.
