101 Reasons to Stop Writing

Ladies and gentlemen, Thursday the 31st of May is International Slushpile Bonfire Day, the culmination of the annual festival of bad writing that is the International Slushpile Awareness Month.

It’s an opportunity for agents, publishers, their assistants, readers and interns to meet, socialise, vent, and publicly exorcise the curse of their profession, the thing that has made the offices unworkable, their schedules and budgets incalculable and their front doors impassable: the unsolicited manuscript.

If you’re an editor or agent, I’m sure you read about this event in last month’s issue of The Conspiragency (If not, check in the literature that came with your Sinister Publishing Cabal starter kit). Time to unlock the storage room, call the biohazardous waste unit and grab a can of lighter fluid, Texas Barbecue size.

If you’re not familiar with International Slushpile Bonfire Day, it’s because you still cling to the delusion that every submission you send out, even the ones that “must’ve got lost in the mail”, is eventually read by someone, somewhere, and that they’re dying to let you know you’ve been accepted, if you just hadn’t screwed up on that arcane, unfair and unadvertised guideline that they invoke to keep the really great writing from seeing the light of day.

Instead, it’s highly likely that those submissions are about to be delivered, via Blaze Express, for consideration by the Great Editor In The Sky. Your work is going to see the light, all right, and for a few magical seconds will be the source of the light.

Now, we’re not talking about submissions that just don’t make the grade because the agent’s client list is full. ISBD is reserved for written equivalent of syphilis, manuscripts so freakishly awful that their stupidity may be communicable. Stuff that has to be taken out of the slushpile with a remote bomb disposal robot, moved away from the Request Partial pile, the Maybe pile and the Leave It For The Intern pile, past the Not Right For Us pile and the Please Don’t Send Us Anything Ever Again pile, around the corner from the Shred Immediately pile and the May Contain Actual Faeces pile, through the hermetically sealed slot onto the Bonfire pile.

See, it’s actually illegal for agents and publishers to put this material back into the postal system, no matter now many stamps you put on the SASE, and governments have set minimum standards for manuscripts that can be flushed down the toilet. So they accumulate, festering in envelopes that used to be white, waiting for the one thing that will consume every page without judgement, the naked flame. And thanks to the groundbreaking research of Ray Bradbury, we even know the exact temperature where this material will ignite (although it can take some time to boil off all the latent body fluids first).

So once a year, agents and publishers are invited to bring the worst of the worst to public places in most major cities, where at the appointed minute, the pyre is lit with the dedication pages from the books written by whiny primadonna authors whose last book would be on the fire if they weren’t already successful.

In previous years, International Slushpile Bonfire Day was kept secret — because if the authors of these manuscripts were capable of appreciating that the fiery destruction of their gibberish was a service to humanity, they wouldn’t be in the Bonfile pile. But back in 2002, the cat was well and truly let out of the burning bag by former sports writer Edgar Harris, whose exposé Literary SF Publishers Announce “International Slushpile Bonfire Day” nearly destroyed the tradition.

This year, it was decided by the board of the Sinister Publishing Cabal to go public, to pre-empt any negative publicity, and raise awareness of the community benefit of eliminating the possibility that this material might ever be discovered and read by the untrained.

International Slushpile Bonfire Day is Thursday, May 31. The flame will be lit around the world at 8PM. Here are 101 Reasons we’ll be covering this event live, round the clock (weather and babies permitting), with coverage of the The Big One in Times Square, New York from our very own roving reporter, Stephen Jayson Harris.