Author’s viral thread about rejection captivates Twitter—but it’s totally fake

Twitter users posted their most epic #ShareYourRejections stories on Thursday. The tales run the gamut from hilarious to heartbreaking, inspiring to just downright awful.

One thread of massive rejection stood out among the pack, likely because it was too good to be true.

Mark Leidner is a writer from Georgia living in Northern California. He’s written a few feature films and several books including his most current a collection of short stories, Under the Sea. Leidner shared his epic tale of rejection that involved making fun of his own writing, getting an agent, and possibly getting sued for editing his own work.

Here’s Leidner’s tale of tragedy, in 11 tweets.

I once rejected my own short story from a magazine I was guest editing. The magazine had a blind submission policy, and I didn't recognize the story as my own and forgot I'd submitted it months before I was asked to guest edit the issue

— mark leidner (@markleidner) August 16, 2018

Posting the screen shots made me feel confident in my writing and that I was smarter than the entitled fuckface who'd submitted the story. I then sent what I thought was an appropriately polite but harsh rejection only to receive the email myself and realize I wrote the story

— mark leidner (@markleidner) August 16, 2018

Luckily no one that I know of discovered that the excerpts were from my own story. Ironically, the 12K new followers I'd gained in the subsequent weeks were instrumental in giving my agent the leverage to negotiate a seven figure advance for an otherwise unremarkable novel

— mark leidner (@markleidner) August 16, 2018

In the middle of the novel was one, absolutely critical paragraph, and it had been lifted from the original short story. It was none other than the very excerpt I had chosen to post online as an example of unforgivable writing

— mark leidner (@markleidner) August 16, 2018

I eventually caved and the novel was published to no acclaim, and sales were bad enough to pretty much guarantee that I'd never have another deal like that again. In the mean time I'd sunk the advance into bitcoin at the peak, and lost it all

— mark leidner (@markleidner) August 16, 2018

I eventually caved and the novel was published to no acclaim, and sales were bad enough to pretty much guarantee that I'd never have another deal like that again. In the mean time I'd sunk the advance into bitcoin at the peak, and lost it all

— mark leidner (@markleidner) August 16, 2018

Leidner’s tale was so captivating yet catastrophic, Twitter made it a moment. Of course, the story was a completely fake bit of satire that gamed a viral hashtag.

purely fictional, amber! i was just try to invent an memorable example of bad behavior backfiring catastrophically pic.twitter.com/1EnJVBpPXD

— mark leidner (@markleidner) August 17, 2018

So many points of the story don’t pass the sniff test straight from the jump. An author not recognizing his own work and then publicly slamming another writer while guest editing at a magazine seems too stupid to be true. But Leidner’s tale was convincing enough to fool a couple thousand people—maybe he does have a career in fiction.