The Rejection Generator is a labor of love for Sylvester Stonesman. He spends more time with the machinery than with his wife or his children or his aging parents. Because the Generator is in the basement of Stoneslide headquarters, those people often come here seeking him, but we don’t answer the door, and they go away. We frequently glimpse Sylvester stroking pistons, buffing pins and rods, and tenderly cleaning dust out of sprockets, and we have more than once wondered if his deep devotion to helping writers (the reason he invented the machine) has morphed into some form of misguided obsession with the means alone. But then the day comes when he emerges from the basement to tell us of another feature he has built into the machinery or a new mechanism for enhancing the preventive agony inflicted by it.
This week, he stuck his face out of the basement door and announced that The Generator could now automatically produce rejection letters based on the style and imagination of any living writer. The author in question needs only to provide a few milliliters of blood, a cheek swab, a list of at least 14,000 influences with brief explanations of what each has meant to her or him, and transcripts of seventeen hours of psychotherapy sessions focused on rejection. The machine does the rest.
We have not yet been able to find a willing participant for this feature. But this week’s author, Will Mayer, kindly volunteered to write a few rejections himself. We fed those into the Generator manually, and it found them pleasing.
