There are two rules for The Library of Rejected Beauty:
- The work must have been created specifically for publication somewhere else.
- And then have been rejected by that place.
Did you spent hours crafting an article, story, comic strip or other artistic endeavour with the expectation of getting it published, only to have it cruelly and inexplicably rejected by tin-eared philistines? Has a commissioning editor failed to recognise your obvious greatness once again? Maybe your review of a film, play or book flies in the face of what your usual readership wants to hear. You wrote a short story to a bizarre set of restrictions for a competition and it failed to even place. Or you authored an article that was just so goddamn prescient and well-researched that no one would touch it with a bargepole.
And yet, and yet…it was really good. You know it. The reason it was rejected will forever remain a mystery, but one thing’s for sure: it wasn’t lack of quality.
It can languish on your hard drive, or it can shine in glorious brilliance as part of the Library of Rejected Beauty, which will one day be hailed as the twenty first century’s greatest repository of ‘See, I just was ahead of my time’.
