Yay, it's the infamous "Equestria Daily rejected me" blog post!

Well, that was an interesting experience. A friend suggested that I should submit The Ballad of Wyverns' Rock to Equestria Daily. I took quite a bit of persuading, since it seemed quite a daunting prospect, but in the end I agreed, partly on the grounds that it was something a bit different from the norm. (Which turned out to be one of the problems.) I was prepared for it to be rejected, since an awful lot of submissions are rejected, but I did genuinely believe it had a chance; I certainly wouldn't submit something I secretly thought was of a truly poor standard.

I got a reply within a day. It was... short. Three lines, in fact, of which the important bit was "...we're not interested in posting your story." There then followed a brief comment to the effect that EqD hardly ever published poetry and any that did get in would have to be of "exorbitant" (their word) quality, which mine wasn't. And that's all, folks. It was pretty peremptory stuff, and the inference to be drawn from the lack of any further comments, even a very basic "this is your first strike" one, seemed fairly clear: it ain't getting in, matey. We just don't want this sort of thing.

I asked for some clarification on the more general point regarding poetry, and got (what I felt was) a much more helpful follow-up reply, possibly either written by someone else or by the same person in a better mood! This did at least go some way towards reassuring me that the initial reader hadn't just gone, "Argh, rhyming poetry! Kill it with fire!" as soon as they saw it. The writer explained that only a small number of EqD readers were interested in poetry, and that while I was welcome to go and polish up the piece and resubmit it, its chances of being accepted would remain "very slim".

So... on the specific matter of this piece, I think that, while I may do some polishing and tidying here and there, I'd rather leave it substantially unchanged and keep it on sites like this one. It's a huge source of irritation -- as a reader as well as a writer -- that poetry is so unpopular in the pony fandom, given that songs are basically poems set to music, but there's not much I can do about it. If I'm ever going to get on EqD -- though it's not an all-consuming ambition of mine so to do -- then I'm pretty sure now that it will be with a prose story.

Also, note to self: do try to spell Aeneid correctly in emails...

Comments

[Rocket]

That's pretty much what I got when I submitted "Three Haiku about Celestia and Luna" a year or so ago. They're just not interested in poetry.