In the current issue of Galaxy's Edge, David Gerrold shares how he had to go to an editor who didn't know him with what would become "Martian Child." Namely Kristine Katherine Rusch.
"My favorite high point isn’t a career thing, as much as it’s a personal. Adopting Sean and the day I met him. There was the day he was placed in my home. There was the day the adoption was finalized. They asked me, I had this wonderful caseworker, and she said are you planning to write a book about adoptions? I said, “No.” One day after he moved in I just started writing a story about how much I loved my kid. It was rejected by the first six editors. It was editors who knew me too well. So I gave it to an editor who didn’t know me very well at all, Kristine Katherine Rusch. She bought it for Fantasy & Science Fiction. We started getting the weirdest, most amazing fan mail on it and it brought home a Hugo and a Nebula and a Locus award and some other stuff, and then we got a movie offer and I expanded it into a novel. So I think The Martian Child would have to be the career high point."
Interesting. I shall worry about this problem when there are more than a couple of editors who know me at all, let alone too well!
1 x SF, 2 x SHM, 11 x HM, WotF batting average .583
Blog
Ha! That's really cool.
I wonder if it's because of those first editors knowing his quirks, or if it was simply a story that needed to be placed somewhere special/with a specific editor's attention? Because it sounds like it all worked out quite fine. 
Finalist x 2
HM x 5
I can't speak to an editor not knowing me (tho once upon a time, back in the Eocine, none
of them did), but I do have a story about a rejection. I had sold Gardner Dozois maybe
15 stories in a row with never a turn-down when he was editing Asimov's, and then he
rejected a story of mine called "Winter Solstice" because it was pure fantasy and he
wanted at least -some- science in his stories. So I sent it to Kris Rusch at F&SF, she
bought it, and it made the Hugo ballot.
I teased Gardner all summer about that...until Labor Day, when he spent the next
year teasing me that maybe I'd made the ballot, but I lost to an Asimov's story. 
-- Mike
Hugo & Nebula multi-award winner
Writers of the Future Contest Judge
... I teased Gardner all summer about that...until Labor Day, when he spent the next year teasing me that maybe I'd made the ballot, but it lost to an Asimov's story.
-- Mike
Ha Ha! That was a great tale. (And congratulations on the awesomeness that is "Winter Solstice".
P.S. If you tell a story about a story, does that make it a meta-story? Or perhaps a story once-removed?
Finalist x2
Semi x1
SHM x5
HM x9
R - lots!
