Oh, dear. It's the fruit of my labours.

So you read. You read a lot. Forty, a hundred pages, three manuscripts per editor per week, two editors. You review, write reports, synopses, opinions, comparisons researched on the internet, in catalogues, the papers. You chat with colleagues, fight your corner, humour your editor, or not. You find foreign language readers, second readers, second opinions and insider insights. Africans, Irish, amateur botanists, historians, Middle East specialists, social workers. Whatever. The winners make it to the editorial meeting, where they might well still get shot down by dubious sales (UK or export), other editors, the MD...

For the rest, someone on the editorial side drafts the rejection letter, trying to be honest, constructive, fair, specific and yet vague enough to cover up the fact that most submissions aren't read past the first forty pages - if that. They try to maintain carefully-wrought relationships with agents, keeping them sweet but outlining an editor's likes, dislikes, likely buys and no-hope-in-Hell case scenarios yet still appearing to be open to the agents' every whim for fear they pass up the next Harry Potter or The Day of the Jackal. You tried, you all tried, and then? Then you see a website like this, and you hope that you or your office haven't been responsible for any of the worst rejection letters ever.

Now, whether Mr Hallamshire is a writer of note is of absolutely no import. I don't know of his work, nor, like the fine folks at A.P. Watt, is science fiction my thing, but I would never, ever write or be permitted to send anything so laid back, so dismissive, so... bad. What is disturbing here is the total lack of writing ability on the part of the editorial staff. Sure, time is a problem, as is the volume coming in from agents is astonishing, and on the agenting end, well, God only knows. If we get three or four fiction submissions per editor per day, I can but imagine what the agents get. But oi. If this is legit, try harder.