Lorem Ipsum

Paula Guran has an essay about the horrors of reading slush at DarkEcho. At some point I hope to write a piece about the non-horrors of reading slush; this entry is just a starting point.

I can't speak to the question of novel slushpiles; I have no experience with those. But there's a common belief about short-fiction slushpiles that about 90% of the stories that come in are among the worst pieces of fiction ever conceived. In my experience, and that of most other editors I've heard comment on this, that's just not true. In general, I think about 60%-80% of what comes in is just okay. Not good, not bad, just nothing special. It's true that there's stuff at the low end; the bottom 10%-20% is truly awful. But there's also plenty of stuff at the high end; the top 10%-20% is anywhere from interesting to unusual to extraordinary.

So I'm not entirely clear on why so many people are so revolted by slushpiles. Maybe SH gets a higher quality of slush than some other places do, but I've heard other editors also say that the majority of what comes in is decent but not exceptional. Maybe having multiple editors to split the slush-reading helps; maybe if I had to read three times as much slush as I do, I'd be less sanguine about it. Not sure.

I do first-reading on about a third of the stories that come in, which these days means about 15-20 stories a week. Of those, I'll generally pick 1 to 4 stories that I think are worth having Susan and Chris take a look at. That doesn't seem so bad to me.

I'm not saying that I like reading the truly awful submissions, but I don't mind them all that much; there's enough good stuff to make it all worthwhile. I know some book editors see slush-reading as a sort of duty, to be undertaken even though there's no chance that anything good will come out of it; perhaps that's true for novels, but it just doesn't seem all that onerous to me for short fiction.

We'll see how I feel in a few years as our total submission rates continue to increase, though.