Dear LR:
You deserve a few words from a working artist-- words of consolation at this moment.
It is very hard to be rejected, and particularly by a syndicate or guild or agent who handles people you admire. Particularly if you have seen their work and some of them are not as good as you are.
I have been through this. I am tender about rejection, and have been rejected many times.
Oddly, even though I have known folks who tried a thousand times to enter something like THE NEW YORKER, I have also met folks who breezed in.
A little story about the inequities of rejection and acceptance.
When I was teaching at Moorpark College, close to the time abcrystcats was a student there, over 25 years ago, I knew a young student named Matt Mahurin.
Matt was a very talented photographer, and his work looked original, even for a young man's.
He was also an illustrator ( he later turned to movies and MTV videos). While I knew a dozen marvelous young artists rejected by big-time publications and agents hundreds of times, the VERY FIRST job Matt got while he was still in college was the cover and eight interior pages of TIME magazine.
http://www.sfjff.org/sfjff24/people/ind ... ctID=44351
Why did he get this job? His work was good, original, but most of all, he knew somebody.
Think about how you get music gigs. Maybe people hire you because they heard your cd and think it's marvelous.
But most of the time, it's because you or someone you know ( say your partner Barry) knows the person who owns the club, or the person who books for the club.
Joseph Heller worked for a publishing company and for McCalls magazine. He was an insider in the publishing biz. But it still took him twelve years to get CATCH-22 published, one of the most successful American novels of the 20th century.
Jerzey Kozinski, running an experiment for ESQUIRE, re-submitted his novel, "The Painted Bird", to nineteen publishers under another name different from his own. All the publishers, including the original publisher who had printed his book ( which won several prizes) rejected the manuscript. Virtually every one, including the book's original publisher, used a form rejection slip.
One last.
Ray Carver had only been able to publish his work in small literary magazines until his boyhood friend became a major publisher's editor.
His friend then asked for all Ray's work, pitched it frequently, and wore the gatekeepers down. Ray Carver finally got a chance to become Ray Carver.
Unfortunately, he died soon after.
Your work is keen-edged, snappy, accurate and well-crafted.
You probably simply don't fit an available "niche" at the moment in Creator's Syndicate.
Dan Piraro took years to achieve syndication, one of the most creative cartoonists in this country.
My consolation comes in the form of the little note above.
Your friend and fellow rejected writer/ artist,
Zlatko