Yes gentle readers, I must admit that even I, Award Winning Playwright Matthew J. Hanson, do occasionally send plays to people, and get rejected. I know it's hard to believe, but not every theatre has the basic common sense that good people at The Blood Unicorn Theatre Company have.

So in the face of these occasional rejections I have taken to find joy in little elements of personalization. For example, I always prefer rejection letters that mention my play and/or self by name, rather than "Dear Sir/Madam." It makes me feel like they took that extra time, even if it was only the extra time to run a mail merge.

Or like today, I got a letter from the good people at the Metropolis Performing Arts Center. It wasn't even a rejection letter, it was just a letter acknowledging my submission. It looked mostly like it was form letter with mail-merged name and play, but at the end it concluded "Thank you for giving me the opportunity to read your work (again! I am pleased you decided to submit again this year)."

I mentioned the "again" in the letter I enclosed with the play, so they might not have needed to look up whether I submitted before or not, but just the fact that there was something in my letter that differentiated it from the countless other submission out there was nice.

(Yes, there were probably countless other plays that were entered by people who had submitted in the pass, and yes, I'm pretty sure you can engineer that sort of thing with a simple check box, but still...)

Proving that once again, in theatre, like in quantum-mechanics, it's the little things that count.