Lorem Ipsum

Mary Anne pointed me to this article about "International Slushpile Bonfire Day" over at Revolution SF, reminding me yet again that I really oughtta make time to read them more regularly; I've liked most of what I've seen at that site. This particular piece is fun, with a couple of great lines.

I do feel obliged to note, though, that the SH slushpile has not (yet?) been subject to many of the traditional ills of a slushpile. (Knock on wood.) In the 20 months or so that we've been receiving submissions, nobody has ever submitted slash to us. We get some really poorly written submissions (maybe 5%-10% of what comes in); we get a few nonfiction pieces; we get a fair number of gory horror stories (though I think the percentage of those in the slushpile is dropping); we get a fair number of non-speculative literary stories (and more recently). But we don't get fanfic (I've only seen about two fanfic stories of any kind, out of 2700 submissions), and we rarely get totally incomprehensible drivel, and we cleverly managed to avoid receiving submissions written in crayon (or blood) on Kleenex by looking only at email subs.

In fact (I know I've said this before in various forums, but I figure it bears repeating until the meme catches on), although I've seen a fair number of pro editors say "I will never consider email submissions, because it'll make the slushpile even worse; I'll be flooded with drek," our slushpile has been overall pretty decent. It's possible that we just haven't gotten big enough to catch the attention of the Buffy/Xena slash writers; maybe our slushpile quality will decrease as we become better-known. But so far I haven't seen any sign of that; if anything, the average quality has gone up over time, as some good writers overcome their initial distrust of online publication.

(I should note, in deference to my friends who read and write slash, that I hear there's some pretty good slash out there. But regardless of quality, we can't publish it, for intellectual-property reasons, so any such stuff that came in would just be rejected anyway.)

We also don't get death threats, and there've only been about three times that authors have argued with our rejections (and one of those was for a rejection that we didn't actually send, for a story we hadn't seen, complaining about our publication of stories that we hadn't published; I assume the author just wrote to the wrong email address). And about three times that authors have gotten really nasty about our strongly worded statements that they shouldn't have sent us simultaneous subs and wasted our time. In fact, I can't help but wonder if there's a cause-and-effect relationship there: we very carefully designed our form rejection to avoid insulting authors, and lo! we don't get a lot of insulted mail from authors.

Okay, enough. You'll probably hear me say all this again at one time or another, so I'll stop now.