Dear Polythene,
Many thanks for submitting your story, “Endangering All,” to us.
Though we generally quite like catastrophic and dystopian themes, we didn’t feel this one was the right fit for us.
The premise was somehow flawed by the fact that all characters were very similar in their ambitions, and they were all quite bad, making it difficult for us to root for any of them. We don’t mind an evil soul, but we need for them to have a better motive and to be more complex characters, with depth and background stories.
We liked the ambition behind the narrative but think that you possibly spread yourself too thinly and would be better off scaling down and sticking to a few places where your characters would serve an actual purpose.
With regards to grammar and tense, we didn’t think the use of future was good for this story at all and would strongly advise switching to the past tense.
We were completely flummoxed by your style which was both horrifying and fascinating and probably the best thing out of this story. However, we were not big fans of the gratuitous, unrelenting animal cruelty. We know our guidelines are quite lax but this was a bit much and we got squeamish a few times.
We are sorry this isn’t better news. We have listed below a couple of magazines that are currently open for submissions and might be a better fit for your story:
Donald Trump Weekly – “We support destruction – 50% of your entry fees goes to the NRA!”
Deniers.com – “A magazine by deniers, for deniers. Submit now!”
All the best,
The editors
***
B F Jones is French and lives in the UK with her husband, 3 children and cat. She has stories published in various online magazines and her debut collection, “The Fabric of Tombstones,” is published by The Writing Collective and will be out in April 2020.
Rejection Letters 