New York – One of the most onerous tasks in the magazine and book trade is the sifting of the slush pile. Slush piles, the collection of unsolicited and unagented manuscripts sent to publishers by beginning or would-be authors, are sometimes the source of future literary successes, but more often than not are the source of headaches and indigestion. Many editors privately complain and scream about the uselessness of slush piles, but fearing a backlash from beginning writers who already assume conspiracies keep their work from being printed, very few speak out about the quality and quantity of the material received.

With this in mind, the international literary community announced a special amnesty day for those long-suffering editors forced to sift through manuscripts where everything but the name of the author was misspelled on the title page. April 31, 2002 marks International Slushpile Bonfire Day, where editors and publishers are encouraged to collect all of the unreadable or unusable manuscripts that have built up in their offices, in some cases since 1968, and burn them while drinking wine and singing songs. Since one of the worst offenders is the science fiction / fantasy / horror triumvirate, SF, fantasy, and horror editors are allowed to place the first documents and light the pile when complete.

New York editors gather for Slushpile Bonfire Day

"We’re burning everything," said Pablo Redondo, the organizer of the event and the only editor willing to appear on television. "All of the manuscripts with no merit other than the tag ‘Member, SFWA"’ on the cover page. The manuscripts where the author didn’t bother to read the submission guidelines and dumped off the copy to a magazine that doesn’t buy that sort of fiction, or doesn’t buy fiction at all. The manuscripts where the author already registered the story for a copyright ‘to keep editors from stealing their work’. The Wesley / Worf slash fanfiction sent in ‘just in case we had an interest.’ The manuscripts sent in on toilet paper or on Hello Kitty note paper, and the manuscripts sent with death threats against any editor who plans to reject it, and the 3000-page ’sequels’ to popular books written because the author didn’t like how the original ended. We’re making a big pile in the middle of Times Square, and every editor with a slush pile is invited to pitch in. Big magazines, small book lines, Webzines, rantzines, and weekly newspapers: every editor in the world is welcome to start the healing here."

In return, the rest of the publishing community will protect the identity of the participants in the bonfire and blame the disappearance of the manuscripts on the Postal Service. "After all, they were all contaminated with . . . um . . . anthrax!" said Redondo. "That’s right: anthrax and Dutch Elm Blight! Maybe a bit of tobacco mosaic and some cane toad venom, but anthrax was definitely involved somewhere. Of course, considering the number of manuscripts we’ve received with any number of bodily fluids all over the envelope, nobody will be surprised in the slightest."

If this seems a bit extreme, the words of an editor who wished to remain nameless explained the situation. "We’re constantly reading in Locus or Speculations about the bad editors who take more than a week to accept or reject a story or novel, but these people don’t know what it’s like. An intern who takes eight weeks to reject a story is most likely needing that eight weeks to recover from jamming a set of ten Lee Press-on Nails in her eyes. By the time she’s able to see again, that same author may have sent another eight to ten stories to the slush pile, and the cycle begins again. Even at our best, we can only afford to publish three short stories and a novella a month, which means we publish a grand total of 36 short stories a year, and we get eight to ten THOUSAND manuscripts a month. This is the only way we can keep up with the overload without going insane and shooting at school buses once we got off work.

"Let’s put it another way," the editor continued. "I hear from one writer who suggests that because of the delay in response to his submissions, we call out HAZMAT teams to pluck his envelopes out of the incoming mail and decontaminate them before opening them. I can’t bring myself to tell him that we can’t afford a HAZMAT team, and each and every one of his stories makes me scrub my arms with carbolic acid whenever I open it. Each one of his stories literally takes away my will to live, and I shudder every time I see his return address on an envelope. And he’s one of hundreds out there, maybe thousands. I have to buy elbow-length rubber gloves on credit just to keep up."

Electronic manuscripts are no exception. "Since the advent of the Web, we’ve been receiving material from people who apparently learned to type by throwing their cats at the keyboard, and some of it is so horrible that we don’t let it dare escape," said Redondo. "Some of it is so foul that we’ve decided to include hard drives in the bonfire, because any hard drive or mail server that contained that story is obviously too contaminated for future use. The New York Fire Department had problems with this at first due to environmental issues, but when we explained the evil that would be removed from the universe by its extirpation, they understood."

An unsolicited submission is thrown on the fire

Surprisingly, no news of this action appeared in any of the journals dedicated to collecting existing and new writing markets, such as Writer’s Digest, The Writer, The Gila Queen’s Guide To Markets, and the innumerable Web sites cataloguing every market that pays in money, credit, advertising space, or raw meat still on the bone. Redondo said that this was deliberate. "The only publication that contained details was the American Editor’s Association newsletter Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash, and anyone who leaked the details to the general public was to be appointed the person in charge of dealing with the repercussions. I myself am going into hiding in New Zealand after this, and I’m not returning to work until after I’ve had extensive cosmetic surgery."

The response from the beginning writer community was, as expected, swift and terrible. A representative of the Eltingville (New Jersey) Science Fiction Writer’s Circle and Costuming Guild released a statement that read, in part, "We decry any efforts to rid the world of our works, and the ESFWC&CG will start up a GeoCities site to hold all of these orphaned stories until the New York literary establishment comes to its senses and buys them back for their full value." When the representative was contacted and asked whether starting up a magazine or book line might be of more value than lambasting the existing editors, the response was "Of course not. They’re supposed to pay us for our work; we’re not supposed to pay to get it published. It’s not our fault that everyone submits stories but nobody pays to read the stories submitted, and we’ll all go to SFWA to complain if the magazines go under. Now go away: I have a Buffy / Farscape crossover novel that I have to get off to St. Martin’s this evening."

Although the editors and publishers in other countries were sympathetic to the idea, it is currently unknown whether or not they will participate. At least one Australian editor expressed support for the bonfire, saying "Australia has only six million people, and between the four science fiction magazines in the country, we’ve received submissions from at least four million. Either we have a lot of razorback hunters and crocodile skinners with plenty of free time in the evening who will suddenly buy subscriptions so they can see their stories in print, or we’re going to have a bonfire of our own in our future."

– Edgar Harris is the former Sports Editor at “Science Fiction Age”. After this article was first published, Harris retired from most forms of journalism, and now makes his living as a horticulturalist specializing in carnivorous plants. He is attempting to breed a species of Sarracenia that will feed on unsolicited manuscripts, to provide a year-round, ecologically-friendly alternative to the bonfire.

Just because the intrepid staff of 101 Reasons To Stop Writing finds so many examples of the site’s thesis in fiction doesn’t mean that we only need to focus on convincing wannabe, beginning, and established writers to quit writing fiction. Beating on poets is easy, and you really have to question the sanity of any mainstream publisher who continues to publish poetry from musicians and movie directors as if anyone’s actually going to buy it. We can all agree that the universe doesn’t need another Star Trek or Star Wars novel, and that the best way to stop their production is to feature their writers in a syndicated TV show much like comedian Bill Hicks’ aborted project Let’s Hunt and Kill Billy Ray Cyrus.

“A discussion on unnecessary and pointless publications is one where everyone has an opinion, and unlike discussions of literary merit, everyone’s usually right.”

However, bad writing, bad editing, and publishing decisions come from all over the place, and not just from the Vassar and Columbia twerps who figure that the world simply needs one more book about a lonely Ivy League graduate turned slushpile editor who finds love at her publishing house. Nope, it’s all over the place, and it’s up to the informed consumer to closer the sewer line.

A discussion on unnecessary and pointless publications is one where everyone has an opinion, and unlike discussions of literary merit, everyone’s usually right. This is because for every genre, subgenre, and passing trend in publishing that might be worth retaining and passing on to future generations, twenty or thirty could use a good stout cleansing, preferably with fire. Almost everyone is going to have a list of particular categories of nonfiction that need just as much discouragement of their writers as for fiction, but let’s start with some of the particular offenders that make my eyes water every time I walk into a bookstore:

Books about rock bands: Any rock band. Unless the author has incontrovertible photographic evidence that Elvis Presley is alive and hiding out in the Roy Orbison Celebrity Rehab Clinic in Sheepdip, Wyoming (where he practices on the small arms range with John Lennon and Kurt Cobain, flies ultralights with Buddy Holly and Stevie Ray Vaughan, and conducts charm school classes with Sid Vicious and G.G. Allin), only one somatype is going to give a damn about a book on any musical act of the last fifty years, and that’s the music critic wannabe. Thanks to the iPod fragmenting normal music distribution channels, there’s no demand for books on the latest international superstar because there’s pretty much no such thing any more. Fans who want to know about a particular musical act usually find all the information they really need online, and they also won’t be embarrassed in twenty years at a friend or spouse finding the definitive biography of Hanson or Phil Collins on a hidden bookshelf in the closet. The Sex Pistols are all turning 50 and the Ramones are all dead, so don’t waste your time on books talking about the punk revolution because it’s not going to happen again just because you’re wearing Butthole Surfers T-shirts to the mall. I almost forgot: Kurt Cobain really was the voice of a generation, and that voice said “Oh, they’ll be sorry for calling me ‘Snivels’ when I’m gone.”

Chrestomathies of newspaper columns, articles, and reviews: Just as with collections of political cartoons, Webcomics, and “the best places to go on the Web”, almost anything ever printed in a newspaper goes flat the day after it comes out. Even some of the best newspaper columnists ever to write are barely worth collecting (Mike Royko, the greatest American newspaper columnist this side of H.L. Mencken, had two posthumous collections of his columns come out through the University of Chicago Press because no non-university press could justify the expense compared to the interest). Political columns are invariably dated before they’re printed in the paper, so putting out massive volumes of political commentary signals an editor interested in a bit of starfucking instead of an actual interest from the reading public. This doesn’t stop every last weekly newspaper film critic and “humor” columnist from attempting to get a collection of their “best” works into print so they can get to work on the all-important signing junket. One quick question for these geniuses: if the only response you get to your work in the paper is a regular cry of “Shut up and die”, why the hell do you expect a different response just because those bad music reviews to albums forgotten years ago are now in book form?

Garden porn: Any horticultural section of any bookstore has two types of books: informative guides and garden porn. The guides are usually for all stages of gardening enthusiast, from beginner to expert, and they’re always full of information that can actually be used to complete a particular project. Garden porn, though, is like real porn: it’s intended to catch the eye in lieu of one actually performing those activities. Go through a used bookstore’s gardening section, and it’s the same depressing list of overpriced orchid guides purchased by a local rich twit who didn’t want to appear dumber than normal at Desperate Housewives functions, collections of “101 Gardens You Need to See Before You Die” to remind everyone of what can be done with their little suburban back yard if they have unlimited time and funds and a crew of indentured servants, and “How to Garden” guides. The last range from the hippie dippie “Turn your lawn into a food garden” manuals that encourage the reader to break laws on grey water use that exist for a damn good, to “How to make your grocery bill stretch further with gardening” pamphlets that can’t seem to get across that depending upon a back yard garden with a family of six is a surefire recipe for cannibalism. Those guides to growing marijuana are as much garden porn as the ones on raising legal herbs for fun and profit, because this implies that the ADD recipients reading them can remember to pull down their pants when taking a crap, much less remember to water and fertilize their charges. These books aren’t intended to be read for legitimate ideas and inspirations: they’re a literary sedative intended to get the purchaser to buy more resource material for the far-off “one of these days” when they’ll have the time to do these projects rather than kvetch about them. By the time that happens, they’re usually too old to enjoy the effort.

Children’s dinosaur guides: The one genre full of more idiots who KNOW that their manuscripts are genius than science fiction is children’s literature, and the one section in children’s literature more overloaded with unnecessary books is the dinosaur section. I realize that not every author of a child’s dinosaur book can be a Robert Bakker or a Louis Jacobs, and not every artist can be a John Sibbick or a Luis Rey, but still. Kids are just as savvy as reasonably well-informed adults, and most of them love science books of all sorts that don’t talk down to them about dumbed-down subjects. The only individual who buys one of the typical children’s dinosaur books, usually a book with information plagiarized from another children’s book written in 1952 and illustrations by an “artist” who paints with his phallus, is invariably a grandmother or other family member who buys it because it’s the first one seen on the shelf. Taking the time to check for scientific inaccuracies, as well as obvious typos, should be a no-brainer, yet I constantly see books on dinosaurs that read as if the author and artist might have heard about the film adaptation of Jurassic Park.

Home improvement guides: Much as with garden porn, anyone who plans to be serious about home improvement, home restoration, home construction, or home demolition has one or two good books on the aspects that aren’t covered with hands-on experience, and the rest are dross. Tie-ins for classic home restoration and furniture construction TV series such as This Old House and New Yankee Workshop aren’t bought by aficionados of the show, because they’re too busy doing instead of reading. Instead, they’re bought by family members who hope to connect with Dad or Uncle Phil during the few moments when they aren’t in the workshop. Likewise, the gigantic piles of discarded Trading Spaces guides in the used bookstore help demonstrate that this little publishing fad is over and that anyone wanting to revamp a bad kitchen or living room should never ask an interior designer for advice: congratulations to former Trading Spaces host Paige Davis and her own mountains of the remaindered autobiography Paige on Paige, for demonstrating that Edie Brickell isn’t the only horsefaced Southern Methodist University brat who parlayed her two sole and perky talents into inexplicable if short-lived fame.

Nonfiction guides to fiction series: The only thing in the universe more pathetic than a novelist famed for writing Star Trek and Star Wars novelizations trying to rationalize how they’re writing great literature while “playing in George Lucas’s and Gene Roddenberry’s universes” is the person writing the “nonfiction” background guides to science fiction and fantasy franchises’ peoples, languages, and technology. Oh, there might be a demand now for a quick guide to the latest bad skiffy show or movie, but take a peek on eBay as to exactly how much of a demand there is for Babylon 5, Farscape, and X-Files nonfiction tie-ins, and those shows ended not all that long ago. And while we’re at it, the authors who continue to crank out “unauthorized” guides to TV shows and movies haven’t been sued for a reason, and that’s because big media companies don’t waste time on pissants and pillocks who call themselves “Treksperts” when they have agents in the afterlife to deal with those issues. If they’re going to demonstrate their skills at jamming their tongues up William Shatner’s ass, they can do so with any number of fallen angels who haven’t had a good dingleberry removal in eons.

Well, that’s a start. Anyone considering other additions is perfectly welcome to take them, print them out on good paper, wad them up, and use them for toilet paper. The idea here is to stop the writing in the first place, not to start further writing by discussing how someone else should take the recommendations to heart. We all hear stories of writers who started because they read a book or short story so bad that they figured “I know I can do better,” so avert that crisis and refuse to buy the offending volume in the first place.

– Paul Riddell used to write, but then he got better.

It doesn’t matter about the subject, the author’s place in the political spectrum, or even the book’s readability: used bookstores literally can’t give [it] away.

Reactionary or radical, we’re still talking about books with an incredibly short shelf life, most of which are already completely obsolete by the time they see print, written and published because of petty grudges and assumptions that “the public needs to know”, and generally about as relevant as a copy of TV Guide from 1980 by the next election cycle.

Last night, I walked in on a reading at my local Barnes & Noble by Carl Bernstein, the other half of the Washington Post Watergate investigation team, literally begging his audience to buy copies of his latest book on Hillary Clinton, and offering refunds to anyone who didn’t like it. This is a man who understands that the volume for which he slaved for the last year is going to be worth all its weight in used Kleenex by next Christmas, much less by next November 4.

It doesn’t matter about the subject, the author’s place in the political spectrum, or even the book’s readability: used bookstores literally can’t give away the flotsam from the last six years of books in support of or in opposition to the Bush Administration, and Elvis help anyone writing a book about any other aspect of politics less than fifty years old.

Another important aspect of publishing in general was illuminated by a comment from a lawyer representing Eagle and Regnery:

No publisher in America has a more acute marketing sense or successful track record at building promotional platforms for books than Regnery Publishing. These disgruntled authors object to marketing strategies used by all major book publishers that have proved successful time and again as witnessed by dozens of Regnery bestsellers.

Just consider that the next time you’re certain that you’ll be able to quit working and write full-time based on the royalties from your first novel.

Even so, I look forward to the results of this lawsuit, if only for the entertainment value. In fact, were I to find someone dumb enough to take the bet, I’d put down $10 on one self-evident fact: the authors discover that the number of copies given away or seriously discounted through various Eagle-owned book clubs and newsletters matches exactly the number of copies that would have had to be remaindered and chopped back into toilet paper due to a lack of interest. At that point, I wonder how well they’d take to comments referring to “half a loaf”, or if former US House Speaker Newt Gingrich plans to play the world’s smallest violin for them while regaling them about the success of his books 1945 and To Renew America.

– Paul Riddell buys all his books remaindered, while the smell of despair is still fresh.

Booksellers want to have it both ways: they want to be able to continue to order books that simply don’t have a market and dump them like a spurned boyfriend without any responsibility or concern.

Nobody involved in publishing wants to talk about the ultimate fate of unread and unwanted books. Our popular portrayals of old books are of volumes allowed to rot and thereby preventing future generations from accessing their knowledge, stated as A Bad Thing. The filthiest profanity one can use to describe a novel is as a “potboiler”, suggesting that its best use is to cook dinner, and “bookburner” or “bookburning” are two words quick on the tongue of every proprietor of a Frumpy Fiftysomething’s Used Books and Quiet Desperation Emporium franchise on the planet. Even with the ever-increasing trend of bookstores becoming outlets for remaindered books, the secret hope is that these books will be discovered instead of consigned to the unknown Mictlan that draws in bestseller and slashfic alike.

However, let’s be realistic here. Even with the shell game that is publishing, where bookstores overorder based on unrealistic sales projections from publishers and return those books for credit for more unsellable gibberish, the excess has to go somewhere. Indie bookstore owners regularly cry about how Borders and Barnes & Noble order gigantic quantities of books and then promptly return them for credit, thereby killing off multitudes of small publishers, but when those publishers suggest that books should be nonreturnable, they scream bloody murder. Even though the issue with nonreturnable product hasn’t exactly killed off the direct-market comics industry, which depends upon its proprietors being sane and rational enough to know their market, booksellers want to have it both ways: they want to be able to continue to order books that simply don’t have a market and dump them like a spurned boyfriend without any responsibility or concern. This doesn’t keep them from crying over the fate of those unwanted books when they’re scheduled to be pulped or destroyed: like most Crazy Cat Ladies, they want to save and protect them all, even the diseased and dying ones collecting in piles on the garage.

If more writers saw their best efforts getting dumped into a pit, and then used to grow roses and walnut trees, they might think a bit harder about whether the world really needs another Dune prequel.

The other options for proper disposal don’t actually solve anything. Remember when Print on Demand was supposed to save publishing? Well, it’s saved big publishers from taking the works of mediocre talents, but the self-published aren’t happy unless they can see their books in a real live bookstore. (Much like the australopithecines who own a music CD and then insist that the local radio stations play the hit single from that very CD over and over, it has nothing to do with anyone actually reading the book, but a primate urge to outshout the naysayers. There’s really not that much of a difference between ordering a copy of your self-published book from the local bookstore and then refusing to pick it up as there is in going out in public in your very own Star Trek uniform after Halloween.) Remember how E-books were going to change publishing as well? Same situation: besides “E-book” becoming the publishing equivalent of “direct to video”, writers, reviewers, and readers don’t take E-books seriously unless they’re also available in dead-tree format.

(I fully expect to get a lot of grief from technoweenies who want to argue that E-books are a viable literary form, mostly because they just paid $500 for a device that allows them to read Star Wars novels at work. I also like to point out that the vast majority of available E-books that aren’t pirated are those given away because their authors acknowledge their value. The fact that Cory Doctorow gives away his novels in E-book format in order to encourage sales of dead-tree copies confirms the absolute value of the E-book to anyone other than to Cat Piss Men who want to cast aside the flesh and join the Singularity because they couldn’t get laid in Tijuana with wads of $100 bills in their jockstraps.)

Again, all of these “alternatives” don’t really address the denial about the final fate of books. Just as how most Americans know vaguely that the T-bone steak they just gnawed to pieces came from a cow but have no idea how it got from cow to dinner plate, both wannabe and established writers cry about books being sold or thrown out from bookstores and libraries without understanding that both have only a limited space for volumes in the first place, and making room for books that readers might want to read means throwing out something that readers don’t. Having all of the library sales in the world still means that some books simply aren’t going to find homes, and what option is left other than using the unwanted books as fuel and then suffering the criticism of being a bookburner?

With these issues, composting is the best option. Instead of consigning those books to a landfill, where they could remain preserved for future palaeontologists to base theories on Homo sapiens terra upon analysis of Robert Jordan and Sidney Sheldon novels, they’ll get broken down and used for future growth. Composting means that Rush Limbaugh’s See, I Told You So and Heather Flores’s Food Not Lawns are on equal ground for end value as well as readability and sanity. Best of all, if more writers saw their best efforts getting dumped into a pit, soaked with high-nitrogen effluvia, cooked for three months, and then used to grow roses and walnut trees, they might think a bit harder about whether the world really needs another Dune prequel.

Book composting: the collector’s bane, the bookstore’s enemy, society’s secret friend. And those with issues on how this is “wasting” books … have you considered stopping writing, thereby saving a few more Douglas firs intended for the paper mills and eliminating the middleman?

– When Paul Riddell quit writing to focus on horticulture five years ago, he had no idea that he’d continue shoveling crap. In this case, though, at least he’s getting something of beauty from the effort. Take a look at examples at The Texas Triffid Ranch.

Because I love you all, I’m going to pass on some handy stock advice. If you own stock in Borders Books and Music, pay attention to your analyst and dump it as fast as you can, as soon as you can. Alternately, if you don’t, get prepared to buy up lots of Borders stock and short the shit out of it right after Christmas. Borders has already been flirting with bankruptcy and moved to heavy petting last holiday season, complete with a talk of a merger with Barnes & Noble, and the fact that its current latest publicity stunt involves its new employee vanity press gives an idea of how badly the company must be doing.

Working both as a features writer for various magazines and weekly newspapers and as a technical writer for various telecom-related companies, I have by necessity learned how to sniff out a media venue’s imminent demise. It’s a fascinating dance, where the owners want to sell but can’t sell unless they can prove that the enterprise has something approximating a worthwhile value, and that value is usually tied up in its workforce. Quite understandably, discovering that their place of employ is about ready to be sold for parts, or bought to be shut down, encourages all but the most deluded grunts and middle managers to consider that latest job offer or nibble, and the company’s value goes under for the last time as the only people who know how to run its operations bail out for safer employ. Because the upper managers stand to make insane amounts of money, both from the sale and from “executive retention bonuses” designed to reward incompetent managers for sticking with a dying company until the sale is final, the last thing they want is for the workforce to leave before they’ve decided that it’s no longer necessary.

To that end, I’ve seen some of the sleaziest, most backhanded, and most ridiculous stunts intended to keep employees on the bridge of the Titanic, and the most entertaining always come from dying magazines and newspapers. Being sad creatures, most magazine and newspaper staffers put up with poor pay, lousy work conditions, and incessant sexual harrassment on the hope that they’ll be in the right spot to become Noticed, and they’ll believe any outrageous lie if it means that they might get a regular column, become an editor, or get corporate sponsorship of the book deal they’ve been obsessing over. (I’m just as guilty as anyone else of this, but I’d like to think that I learned from my mistakes. This is why I don’t include the two weeks where I was technically senior editor of the long-dead weekly DFW Icon on my resume.)

It’s not news that booksellers with delusions of being publishers have been popping up and going bankrupt ever since the first organ-grinder monkey got the idea of conducting a concerto. Just look up the history of “Wired Books” one of these days. It’s also not news that one of the two battle cries of every bookstore grunt who continues to slave away on a dead-end retail position, when asked “Why do you keep working when you could use your college degree to get something better?”, is “But I wanna stay in the publishing business!” (The other battle cry is “I’m not getting paid enough to work this hard,” usually said right before being rejected for a raise because the slacker couldn’t be bothered to work hard enough to earn one. The notorious spoof Borders Online Employment Application was written after considerable observation of the Borders employee in its native habitat.) The level of hubris in that cry, in a world where we’d all justifiably laugh and point at a McDonald’s frycook crying “But I wanna stay in the ranching business!”, says a lot about the unjustified romance attached to working in a bookstore, and it’s right up there with the perceived romance of starving in an unheated loft apartment while “pursuing your art”.

Kids, take it from my experience. Starving and freezing in a garrett space might sound romantic when you’re 21 and don’t know any better, but living in squalor loses all of its charm by the time your thirtieth birthday rolls around. The chain bookstores couldn’t keep a workforce were it not for the hearty denial of legions of well-read twits with all of the hopes of a fiftysomething Whitesnake groupie, and Borders management knows it.

Now, author Nick Mamatas had quite a bit of fun with the whole idea of Borders starting a line of books written by its employees, and other wags correctly asked such pertinent questions as “So what happens to the guy who has to remainder his own books?” It’s not as if Borders has any track record for anything other than opening superstores next to incompetently run indie bookstores and stealing away the employees. (At the store down the street from my house, at least two of the managers are people who drove their stores out of business all on their own, and continue to work at Borders because nobody’s insane enough to trust them with the money to start a new store.) Borders let both Amazon and Barnes & Noble take over the online sales market before anyone even deigned to start up an official Borders Web site that actually allowed customers to buy books. While Barnes & Noble built up quite the customer incentive program with its preferred customer cards, Borders only recently started their own “free” program, which offers no real discount for joining but gives Borders plenty of information for data mining. The only real draw Borders ever had was that it offered deep discounts on new hardcovers to its customers, and now it’s being squeezed by Wal-Mart and Amazon, two companies that know how to cut their margins. And somehow a new book line full of employees’ contributions is supposed to make a difference.

The real reason why I’m recommending shorting the stock in December, though, is because of the way the employee book line is being run. If you go up and read the actual press release on it, this is a contest. Because of the joys of being a writer, Borders has a lot of fulltime and parttime writers in its employ, many of which would probably be glad to contribute everything from historical novels to science fiction encyclopedias if Borders was interested in a real book line. Instead, the idea is that those pros are to have their work put in a big slushpile alongside every Legolas/Gimli slashfic writer manning the Graphic Novels section, have them picked through by persons unknown, and voted upon by judges unknown, with no way of being able to tell if the winners got their breaks due to talent or because a Borders district manager wants to break in his casting couch. And before you say it, yes, that’s ridiculous from a publishing point of view. You’ll notice that the only people in book publishing who run such “contests” are vanity presses, and that’s because everyone wins in one of those.

While we’re at it, let’s look at the people who’d be participating. Anyone who’s ever been to a Borders book signing knows the murderous look from about half of the employees at the author, and anyone who’s ever roomed with, dated, or been married to a Borders employee has heard all of the crass and whiny comments of “I can’t believe that s/he actually got a contract! I know I can write better than s/he can!” At least with a book line that works with established authors, that line can point to “The bestselling author of Brand X” to promote each offering. What’s Borders going to do? Run an ad campaign that starts with “You know Smitty, the unwashed toad who gets into pissing matches with customers in the Computer Science section over Java programming and who hides in the back whenever he’s asked a question by a customer? Buy his latest book, Hot Science Fiction Editors I’d Like To Pork, exclusively at Borders today!”?

All said, this whole scheme is ridiculous, asinine, and incredibly expensive for the miniscule return … if it were actually dedicated to publishing undiscovered authors within the Borders family. However, remember that the only people are allowed to play are Borders employees, and I’ll bet good money that any participant has to sign a release form stating that any book deal is contingent upon remaining an employee in good standing. Faced with the promise of becoming a real author person, complete with signing junkets and writeups in Publisher’s Weekly, how many participants are going to leave even as the stern of the Titanic slips beneath the surface and upper management collects its executive retention bonuses? After all, when it comes down to value for money, nobody’s going to expect them to stay for free while they’re taking care of the bankruptcy proceedings. And in the darkness and the cold, the mewling of “But they promised they’d publish my book!” will be the last anyone will hear.

– Paul Riddell has been accused of being a Borders employee, but attending a local poetry reading in 1994 left him wanting to shoot at school buses for years afterward. More examples of hubris and bile are available at the Esoteric Science Resource Center.

Author Bob Dietsche reports that sales of his new book Jumptown, about Portland’s history as a jazz hot spot, have been going quite well, thank you. Although there was that reading last month at St. Johns Booksellers out on Lombard, where a guy in the front row fell asleep and snored so loudly Dietsche could barely hear himself talk. With about five minutes to go, the guy woke up with a start and announced, “Hey, I gotta go now.” Well, you’re bound to lose a few of ‘em.

Talk to any number of writers who’ve made the mistake of public readings and signings, and they’ll give you similar stories. Considering that your intended audience consists almost solely of fellow frustrated wannabes who attend the reading to:

1. pick up any of the frumpy fiftysomethings sans date who really don’t want to go home alone to a dark efficiency apartment and fifteen cats,
2. snag the free coffee and snacks in lieu of actually paying for groceries, and
3. look for any hint that the proprietor of the bookstore hosting the event might be willing to let you read from your World of Warcraft chronicles,

– you might want to consider how you’d react when your audience starts snoring like this. Better yet, you can bypass the shame of asking the person next to the snorer to “please wake up Mom and take her home” and stop writing.

Contrary to popular opinion, Paul Riddell isn’t the mastermind of this blog, but he’s perfectly happy being the perfect evil assistant, as demonstrated at the Esoteric Science Resource Center.

Turn to any of the pulp magazines, and you will find out how bad it can be at its worst. No, not quite at its worst, for the contributors to the pulp magazines have at least broken into print – they have as they say, made the grade. Below them are thousands of aspirants of even slenderer talents – customers of the correspondence schools, patrons of “writer’s conferences” and of lectures by itinerant literary pedagogues, patient manufacturers of the dreadful stuff that clogs every magazine editor’s mail. Here is the ultimate reservoir of the national literature – and here, unless I err, is only bilge. - H.L. Mencken, Five Little Excursions, Prejudices, Fifth Series, 1926

Having barely escaped a life of absolute poverty by quitting writing, astute and observant readers might think that I am opposed to the concept of writer’s conferences, writer’s workshops, and “retreats”. Not at all: in my youth, I used to bore compatriots and friends with my attitude that no beginner should ever waste his or her time or money attending “How To Write” workshops, but I’m now in favor of every twerp who exclaims “I wanna be a writer so I can be famous/get laid/quit my day job” signing up for as many workshops, conferences, conventions, and “adult continuing education” weekends as they can possibly afford. This is the only way to guarantee that they’ll never actually produce anything that crosses an editor’s desk.

In my writing days, I made the supreme mistake of writing for science fiction magazines, and I made the bigger mistake of contacting the liaisons of various science fiction conventions and volunteering to be a guest. Now, only three types of people attend more than one SF convention per year as a guest, and sometimes at all:

• Faded stars who dutifully answer the same dumb questions over and over in exchange for speaking fees that pay the bills better than book royalties or TV script ghostwriting
• Wannabes who managed to get published in some tiny zine or incredibly obscure vanity press and figure that hitting the convention circuit will give them an “in” with editors receptive to a bit of ego or physical massage
• Egomaniacs who’ve managed to build a career of sorts out of pretending to be “edgy” (not understanding that one person’s “edgy” is another’s “goddamn annoying”), and who can be depended upon to state enough outrageous, scandalous, and possibly litigious things during a weekend that the convention will be a hotbed of gossip.

Anyone want to venture a guess as to which category I fell under?

(I would like to remind the reader that the term “hotbed” is a gardening term referring to a growing bed kept at a high temperature by the thorough application of large amounts of manure, which is allowed to decompose and ferment, releasing lots of heat and noxious gas. Once again, this describes most science fiction conventions.)

Because of my unsavory reputation among the few people who cared about what I might have had to say, I could depend upon one constant when attending conventions. No matter where or when, I always found myself as one of the guests on one particular panel. Any SF convention that makes any pretense in giving a damn about literary science fiction, as opposed to the multitude of cons that cater to the fans with eyes only for the stuff being thrown at them via television and film, has at least one panel on the same subject, year after year. With slight variations, that panel is entitled “How To Get Published”.

The characters who tended to infest the panelist side were always a skeevy lot, as these were the people who managed to snag their guest passes because they contacted the convention instead of the other way around. Anyone who’s been to one of these panels recognizes the somatypes:

• The former bigshot horror writer who now resorts to selling “Tips on Writing” pamphlets and copies of her books rescued from recycling bins at the local used bookstore
• The “editor” who’s been involved with every last dead or dying zine, book line, or comic book line in the area for the last twenty years, all subsidized by his ceaseless efforts working for every last dead or dying bookstore in the area
• The character who won a Writers of the Future competition in the late Eighties and still can’t understand why he hasn’t been published since
• The crank with one main agenda, whether it’s a cessation of prejudice against the morbidly obese or efforts to require America Online to offer tech support to users of the VIC-20, who brings up that agenda with every sentence that comes out of his/her mouth
• The habitual project namedropper, with some variation of “It’s on the Viridian List! Have I mentioned the Viridian List?”, with a handful of followers who incessantly refer to him by his cult leader nickname
• And then there’s the self-obsessed genre film critic who still hasn’t caught on that he only got published in the first place because he started writing at a time when output was secondary to quality, and he could make his deadlines

Imagine an hour of this lot sniping, grumbling, and sometimes crying (when the film critic decides that the only way the world will accept his catchphrase of “George Lucas had a better special effects budget, but Ed Wood was the superior writer and director” is to repeat it over and over) and occasionally passing on some basic common-sense basics on what editors want and what publishers don’t.

The real beasts in this show, though, are in the audience. For those who value sanity the way certain entertainment press obsessions value chastity, regular attendance of these events reveals that the audience changes about as often as the panelists. Go through a full decade of these brawls, and you’ll see the same exact people, just looking a bit rougher as the years go by, asking the same questions, taking the same notes, and coming up afterwards with the same exact statements to the guests. Over and over and bloody over, they’ll talk about the latest workshop they attended, or the last bit of advice they received from Bob or Isaac or Ron, or even pass on the latest news they heard about a new market that just opened up. Not once, however, do they say anything about getting published.

Anyone who deals with any aspect of the publishing business has made the same observations with their own captive populations of wannabes. It all comes down to cowardice, because actually getting to the keyboard or the notepad and writing means that there’s the risk of rejection, and wannabes can’t handle the rejection. Worse, they fear acceptance more than rejection, because then they might have to do something to follow up. Getting a rejection letter for a submission is bad enough, but an acceptance means that they’ll have to do more in order to be considered a regular writer instead of a has-been, so it’s easier to find ways to self-reject. Wannabes who just haven’t managed to break through get all sorts of sympathy and encouraging noises from friends and relatives, but those who wrangled one publication back in 1989 get little but scorn when they continue to babble about the dark forces that keep them from doing a followup.

And so the workshop is a great way to get the best of both worlds. They’ll hit up family members or request tuition reimbursement from employers to go to workshops, not wanting to accept that the financiers are glad to contribute just so they can get a week’s respite from the incessant whining. (And if the wannabe comes back to find that he was laid off because he was spending more time preparing for conventions than in getting his job done, or she discovers that her husband left her for one of her best friends because they were tired of being wannabe writing widows, s/he now has someone to blame besides his/her parents for every self-inflicted failure.) They’ll drive spouses, boyfriends/girlfriends, and casual “friends with benefits” insane with demands for a writing office of their own, but never use it: if they get an office, then they’ll keep fussing about one factor or another “isn’t right” until “I just can’t write when those electrons on the other side of the galaxy spin clockwise instead of counterclockwise.” They’ll stutter and start about how “my writing coach thought my stuff was the best he’d ever seen,” not once asking “Did he like it because it was good, did he say that out of pity, or was he just happy to find someone willing to suck baby gherkins out of his butthole on the last night of the retreat?” They’ll repeatedly enter competitions and gleefully hand over the “reading fee,” all because getting accepted by a real publication isn’t half as important as being a runner-up in a contest won by the sponsor’s girlfriend. The most deluded hit up their parents for the tuition for an English or journalism degree, just so they can spend the rest of their lives manning the counter at the local Borders store and telling the customers that “some day I’m going to be famous.”

The point here isn’t to go for resources that might make them improve their abilities: it’s to give them further excuses as to why they can’t print out a single submission and send it in. If you don’t believe me, watch the rationalizations that ensue when the Conjunction of the Million Spheres smiles upon them and they actually get told by an editor that their story is already sold if they’ll finish it.

This is why I’m firmly in favor of these excuses, because every excuse is the universe’s way of bopping the wannabe in the head and screaming “The power of Darwin compels you!” Please: continue to burn up your income on subscriptions to Publisher’s Weekly and all of the Writer’s Digest “How To Get Published” volumes and book clubs. In lieu of activities that might actually cause you to grow as a human, continue to spend your weeknights at the “writer’s group” circlejerks at your local bookstore. Dump as much money as you can afford on Clarion, Ropewalk, Yaddo, and all of the other workshops and retreats out there, even if their “attendee/published author” ratios could be mistaken for the stats for the Chicago Cubs on any given year. Hit every “How To Get Published” panel at every science fiction convention you can find, because the repetition of the same stale points hasn’t made any impact before. Join every contest you can find, even the “children’s poetry” contest held by the local bookstore that always awards first place to the owners’ son so they can write that PlayStation off their taxes. Before you know it, you’ll have a nice big fat pile of awards, certificates, and plaques all worth their weight in used toilet paper, and you’ll be able to wave these at the naysayers who continued to work for “Da Man” while you continued to chase your dreams. I’m certain that those certificates and awards will give you great comfort in your retirement: the metal and wood ones might be recycled for enough money to buy a few cans of cat food, while the paper ones should make great insulation for your cardboard shelter.

Paul Riddell keeps asking “Isn’t attending conventions to improve your chances of getting published right up there with wearing a Next Generation uniform to work every day to improve your chances of becoming a starship captain?”

Chesterton, Maryland — The Science Fiction Writers of America, the long-running organization for professional science fiction and fantasy writers, announced today that it was making drastic changes to how it accepted new members, not to mention how it kept older members within the fold.

“The basic requirements for SFWA membership previously required that a writer have three short stories or one full-length fiction book or a dramatic script appear through professional paying markets,” said Caroline Crawford, SFWA spokeswoman. “However, over the late Eighties and early Nineties, we found the organization flooded with members who received their accreditation through sales to Writers of the Future or Pulphouse magazine, and although they never managed to get published again, they had lifetime membership so long as they paid their membership dues.

“So we find ourselves flooded with members who do nothing more than put ‘Member, SFWA’ on their letterhead and throw tantrums if they don’t get guest badges at local conventions, and voting in SFWA elections against any provisions to remove members unpublished in a decade or more. We had to go to further extremes to enliven the organization and clear out the dead wood.”

Those “further extremes” consist of talent competitions completely unrelated to writing. “Simply put,” said Ms. Crawford, “any current or incipient member of SFWA must be able to impersonate a cartoon character to the satisfaction of an independently selected jury. No exceptions.”

According to the new bylaws of SFWA, each member must be able to impersonate the voice of a particular character in an animated TV show or film, and each character belongs to that author until the author dies or is beaten in impersonation combat.

“Effectively, each fiction writer qualifies for one impersonation. Nonfiction writers get two, and any professional editor gets one to add to his or her total,”, said Crawford. “This means that James Arce-Stevens gets one character, while Mike Resnick, being a fiction writer and a pro editor, gets two.” Initially, the characters selected would be done on a first-come, first-served basis, but two writers selecting the same character may compete in an arena for that impersonation: the winner remains with SFWA, while the loser has to leave the SF genre entirely unless they have an alternative. “Nonfiction writers get two solely because we can use as many as we can get.”

Many extant and former SFWA members jumped on the new rules, with varying results. Harlan Ellison, due to his singular origins (see Harlan Ellison: The Ultimate Literary Warrior Robot), promptly claimed three characters: The Iron Giant, GIR from the Nickelodeon series Invader ZIM, and Bender from Futurama. Said Crawford, “Everybody knows that Harlan goes running around his house on Friday nights impersonating GIR anyway, so this wasn’t too much of a stretch.”

Others had more of an effort. “[Former SFWA President] Norman Spinrad and James P. Hogan had a hard time of it, seeing as how they both do an exemplary Olive Oyl, and we needed judges after about three hours. They just wouldn’t break character. Jim finally managed to win, but Mr. Spinrad managed to get back into the game with a Boomhauer impersonation that left us with tears in our eyes. It was just beautiful. It was almost as stunning as Pat Cadigan’s Snow White or Emily Devenport’s Stimpy.”

Some new and established writers, unfortunately, found themselves out of SFWA. Kristine Kathryn Rusch, unaware that silent cartoon characters were ineligible for consideration, was quoted as saying “Wait, wait…okay, I’m Odie on Garfield. …No? Okay, how about Maggie Simpson? Um. How about Claude Cat? Uh, okay, how about Taarna in Heavy Metal? No? Oh, poop.” Others found themselves at a decided advantage under the new rules: former Weird Tales editor Darrell Schweitzer expressed his opposition to the plan at last year’s World Fantasy Convention, and was allowed in due to his impassioned and incessant cries of “Timmah!”

Other characters were retired without consideration due to the authors’ reputation. “Fritz Leiber used to do an impeccable Fleischer-era Superman, and ever since he died, everyone else left it alone out of respect for him and his work,” said Crawford. Other characters were left alone due to the nasty reputation of the author. “Even though he has no interest in joining SFWA, and we wouldn’t take him if he asked, Paul T. Riddell is known for his Beavis, Zorak [from Space Ghost: Coast To Coast], and Mr. Hanky the Christmas Poo. And they’re right up his alley, so he can have them.”

Likewise, some non-American members of SFWA are understandably aggrieved that some of their cultural icons may be appropriated by Americans, and others feel that the battle for impersonations should cross international barriers. On the Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.sf.written, one angry commentator wrote “I don’t have any problems with Brian Aldiss and Andrew Dennis getting Dangermouse and Penfold, respectively, but why does Robert Sawyer get both Terrance and Phillip? What if I can do a better Phillip?” The particulars on the competition, and whether impersonations worked alone or in conjunction with automatic weapons, was not available at press time.

Whatever happens, most members of SFWA agreed that it’s high time for the membership rules change. One SFWA member, who wished to remain unnamed, said: “The way things were going, just about anyone who wrote for a Buffy fanzine could get in, and some people were talking about a cull. You know, Thunderdome. This is better, though, because everyone knows I do a better Daffy Duck than anyone else alive. And since H.P. Lovecraft isn’t here any more to challenge me, that means I’m set.”

– Edgar Harris is the former Sports Editor of Science Fiction Age magazine. He now writes a regular column on carnivorous plants for the leading alternative gardening magazine, Mondo Horto.

The burden of convincing a population of ambitious ostriches that every word they write is but another grain of sand weighing down their buried heads, is too great for any one man to bear. A lone individual is easily dismissed as a scoundrel and a lunatic; but two men who stand together, shoulder to shoulder against the tide of opposition and denial, is a Revolution.

Thus it was that Paul Riddell came to 101 Reasons, and the Stop Writing movement was born.

Paul’s special brand of Reality chili, served with complex analogy salsa and wrapped in a tortilla of painfully honest anecdotes, is the perfect alternative when you find my own brand of Give Up Your Hopeless Dreams (with a side of You Suck) is too sweet and easily digested.

Paul Riddell’s Guest Posts:

1. Slushpile Freakonomics — “That’s not to say that the enterprising wannabe can’t set himself up for a career of incredible bitterness or unrelenting fantasy in freelance writing. The problem here is the timing.”
    
2. The Aspie Dilemma – “For a group that prides itself on self-diagnosed Asperger’s Syndrome, wannabe writers sure have a problem with spotting patterns.”
    
3. Turds, Remainders and Other End-Products — “Just as no high matches that of the first byline spotting, nothing works better at crushing unjustified hubris than making a quick trip to the remainder bin.”
    
4. The Savings That Matter – “One business report after another makes much hay out of how smoking costs $X million in lost hours every year in the US, but nobody takes the time to research how many man-hours are lost every year to wannabe writers.”
    
5. Five Years Later, Did We Learn Anything? – “It’s not just enough to encourage the idea that the life work of most ‘writers’ are so foul that their work automatically gets dumped into a furnace somewhere: we should all encourage the idea that the torching will be a public event.”

These posts should at the very least dissuade you from ever introducing yourself as a writer, in case the person you’ve just met is Paul.