Thread by @markleidner

I once rejected my own short story from a magazine I was guest editing. The magazine had a blind submission policy, and I didn't recognize the story as my own and forgot I'd submitted it months before I was asked to guest edit the issue

Thinking it was someone else's, I hated it so much that I screen-shot several of its absolutely worst excerpts and posted them online in an attempt to shame the author and anyone else about to commit the same crimes

Posting the screen shots made me feel confident in my writing and that I was smarter than the entitled fuckface who'd submitted the story. I then sent what I thought was an appropriately polite but harsh rejection only to receive the email myself and realize I wrote the story

Before I was able to delete the screen shot, it had accumulated over 8K likes and 4K shares. Not only that, another post that had screen shot my post had over 75K shares and likes. I was able to delete my own post but not the one that had screen shot my screen shots

Luckily no one that I know of discovered that the excerpts were from my own story. Ironically, the 12K new followers I'd gained in the subsequent weeks were instrumental in giving my agent the leverage to negotiate a seven figure advance for an otherwise unremarkable novel

I'd been workign on. 6 months later, when I was revising that novel on a deadline for my editor, who worked for a major publisher, I realized with a shock that the entire novel was an expansion of the same short story I'd submitted and rejected, which I'd also forgotten

In the middle of the novel was one, absolutely critical paragraph, and it had been lifted from the original short story. It was none other than the very excerpt I had chosen to post online as an example of unforgivable writing

When i called my editor and tried to tell her that I had to cut that paragraph, she was incensed, and said "it was the only good paragraph in the novel," and if I cut it out, I'd be in breach of contract, and the publisher would sue me to the tune of twice the size of the advance

I eventually caved and the novel was published to no acclaim, and sales were bad enough to pretty much guarantee that I'd never have another deal like that again. In the mean time I'd sunk the advance into bitcoin at the peak, and lost it all

I then had to pay taxes on the advance, and I now owe the IRS $175,000 #ShareYourRejections