Submission flood
This past week turned out to be the fourth-highest-volume week ever for SH submissions; we received 90 stories this week.
That was partly 'cause Tuesday tied for fifth-highest-volume day ever, at 22 submissions, and partly 'cause the rest of the week was also relatively high-volume in general. And partly 'cause a certain silly group of writers continued their tradition of bombarding us with a themed set of April Fool's Day stories.
It started with a dozen zombie unicorn stories in 2003 (I think they were originally also supposed to feature space stations, but most of them didn't); then a dozen monkey stories in 2004 (in honor of the Notorious Style Monkeys; I would link to Jay Lake's original use of that phrase, but the review in question seems to no longer be available online); then half a dozen "they fight crime!" stories in 2005. I think everyone was kind of surprised when we ended up buying one of the 2004 stories and two of the 2005 stories.
This year there were half a dozen stories whose theme appears to have been "rock sex." Also, most of them came with a poem in the cover letter.
I'm surprised that there weren't more theme stories than that; it seemed like more as they were coming in. It's possible some of them just aren't as obviously part of the theme as others. We'll see. And there may be more tomorrow; some of the theme stories have come in late in past years.
I'll close with the same comment I made three years ago, when all this started:
You people are very silly.
I still mean that in a good way, of course.
. . . Oh, one other SH fiction-department thing: we've now responded to all stories submitted before 13 February 2006; if you or anyone you know sent us a story before that date and haven't heard back from us, please query.