International Slushpile Awareness Month is an annual celebration of the unsung heroes of the publishing process: the Slush Readers, those hardy adventurers who pan for gold at the edges of the vast wasteland of sediment at the mouth of the River of Unreadable Shit.

Without them, modern publishing would be entirely (instead of mostly) written-to-formula potboilers from established hacks, cash-ins by Internet celebrities, political gasbag rhetoric assembled by interns, and stream-of-consciousness doorstops where the glue is still warm.

For writers, it’s also a chance to think about the Slushpile, and your place within it. Are you truly expecting that someone will jump at the chance to publish/represent you, or are you just hoping for validation and a free critique? Is your work really that one-in-a-thousand that deserves consideration, or are you merely hoping to skip the next nine-hundred-and-ninety-eight drafts?

For editors, agents and assorted slush readers: we feel your pain.

Previous Coverage

For those of you who missed last year’s event, here’s a roundup:

• International Slushpile Awareness Month: They screen out the unpublishable, the unpalatable, the unreadable short stories and novels, in search of that one manuscript in a thousand that is original, well written, proofread, spellchecked and printed in 12 pt Courier, and which might be good enough for agents and publishers to invest time and money to release to a public who might be willing to pay to read it.
• Top Ten Reasons You’re Stuck in the Slushpile: #10. You addressed your submission to "The Slushpile".
• Calling for a Slushpile Armistice: An end to the partisan bitterness which prevents people on both sides from properly accepting blame for their part in the slow downfall of publishing.
• Reason #14: Youre Speling is Atrowshus: A sizeable proportion of every slushpile is comprised of randomly, punctuate’d, fonetikly riten first drafts so bad, so head-shakingly wrong that they would make proofreaders weep and copyeditors resign, if they didn’t initially make slush readers shudder with fear as they drop the submission into the Burn This pile.

We also ran a couple of polls. You can view the original results, and vote (again):

• Poll: What Do You Think of the Slushpile?
• Poll: What’s the longest you’ve waited for a response to a submission?

Slushpile Demotivators

We’ve published several Slushpile-themed Demotivators here at Reasons Central:

Click on the images to see a larger version, download wallpaper, or add a comment.

International Slushpile Bonfire Day

International Slushpile Awareness Month culminates on May 31 with International Slushpile Bonfire Day, a universally-recognised tradition where agents and publishers take the opportunity to hand over their accumulated backlog of unsolicited submissions to Nature’s own impartial and inexhaustible reader, the naked flame.

ISBD in 2007:

• Announcing International Slushpile Bonfire Day: 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.
• ISBD For Editor, Agents, and Slush Readers: If you’re new to the biz, or your office is too far from the nearest organised bonfire, or you’;re hopelessly agoraphobic, fear not. You can still join the festivities.
• ISBD For Writers: Without a doubt, deep in the shadows of your fragile heart, you know that some of the stuff you’ve written has all the literary merit of initials carved in a tree the day before a forest fire. Why not discover the healing powers of ISBD for yourself, by making your own contribution?
• Breaking News: International Slushpile Bonfire Day a ‘Blazing’ Success: The city’s publishing establishment came together this evening in Times Square to celebrate International Slushpile Bonfire Day, an annual festival to purge the industry’s ever-growing backlog of unpublishable manuscripts. New York’s literary elite mingled with industry professionals to swap stories of the worst of the worst writing to come over the transom, while truckloads of paper holding the creative output of thousands of untalented writers were dumped into a prescribed area and ignited.
• Five Years Later, Did We Learn Anything? Paul Riddell explains the origins of ISBD, for those of you who can stand the metafiction.

Note: Several of the interviewees refer below to a mythic entity, variously known as the ‘Slush King’, ‘Slush Queen’, ‘Slushmaster’ or ‘Slushmistress’. I’m assuming that this is this refers to ASIM’s submissions handler, and not to an actual monarch of the slushpile — if it’s the latter, I think they’ve been reading slush way too long. In any event, I’m sure it’s a hereditary title.

How far “out there” do some people go? Worst/strangest/most elaborate?

Haynes: I’ve written and edited my response to this question several times now, because I don’t want to offend anyone. I’ll just say that I’ve read a couple of stories which should probably have been forwarded to mental health experts. Horror, of course.

Battersby: The worst submission I’ve received wasn’t actually a submission at all! It was an emailed invitation to peruse somebody’s 17000 line SF poem regarding their cat, and to reproduce as much, or all, of it as I liked. I’ve also had to reject one submission on the grounds that, even if the writing had been up to scratch, we just couldn’t bring ourselves to publish a story where the author had chosen to illustrate each paragraph with an assortment of clip art that he insisted had to be reproduced.

What responses, if any, have you received from rejected writers?

‘Charlie’: I don’t get responses directly but we do get feedback sometimes which the Slush king or Queen shares. It is always positive, saying how much the author appreciated the feedback and the time we have taken to give it. But they may be hiding the negative stuff.

Wessely: Generally we get a very positive response from our writers, because a) our reading process is very transparent and we keep authors in the loop as to what stage their story is at and b) we often provide feedback from the slushers. There are some loopy people out there who get a bit paranoid about their ‘baby’ – to them I say if you can’t handle rejection (and can’t read the emails the slushmistress/master sends to you regularly and take them at face value!) maybe you shouldn’t be in this game. We try to do it nicely and constructively, but as an author, you need to deal with it!

Haynes: Personally, none. The slushmaster isn’t supposed to put our names on the response(s), but I think a couple did slip through once so I stopped putting my name, sig or anything else in my replies. Eventually I stopped commenting altogether. Yes or no, that’s it.

Battersby: The majority of writers I’ve worked with have accepted rejections for what they are: confirmation that this story won’t be purchased by this magazine at this time. (NB: That’s all they are.) Occasionally I’ve had a writer contact me to ask whether there’s anything they need to do in order to be more successful next time, or whether I had a view on what should happen to the story next. It’s not a move I’d recommend, but  anybody who shows humility and dedication should be welcomed gently. However …

Every now and again, you push somebody’s ego button. I’ve received the odd ‘rejection reply’ where the author has chosen to respond to the rejection itself, just to let me know how wrong I was. Nothing you can do about people like that: they just don’t know how to behave, and spanking them will only make them madder.

I’ve been on mailing lists where authors have blown off steam or bitched about a rejection I’ve given them. I did so once, myself, very early in my career. Luckily, I had some friends who let me know, in no uncertain terms, how unprofessional that was.

If you could add some clauses to the submission guidelines, what would they be?

‘Charlie’: I would say ‘Read the guidelines’. There is little more disappointing than reading a story that doesn’t fit our criteria.

Wessely: Read the submission guidelines! Oh wait, we already say that. Funny how so many people don’t listen!  Research your market – check out past issues of the magazine, see what we publish, see what we like.

Haynes: I update the website so I can add whatever the hell I like. Bwahaha.

Battersby: No stories about cats. No cheeky hobbit sidekicks. No stories that can be described in terms of another author. No stories that can be described as being “like concept A meets concept B”. Read these guidelines again before you send your story to us. If you cannot recite these guidelines from memory, you are not ready to send to us.

How has reading the slushpile impacted your own writing, and your opinion of publishing?

‘Charlie’: Getting published is a matter of continued effort and writing and re-writing. I now know how subjective is the decision to include something or not. I think about my writing in a different way – I am more objectively critical of it, which I think is for the better.

Wessely: Reading the slush has had one impact on me – I want to be able to publish more of the great stuff I read. It makes me sad when I see really good stories slipping out of the ASIM editorial pool simply because we can’t fit them in upcoming issues.

Haynes: I’d recommend ALL writers get involved in slush reading, except it makes the poor souls submitting stories sound like some kind of lab rats.

Battersby: I’m far more ruthless when it comes to evaluating my own work. Short stories are like stand-up comedy, or rock and roll: brevity is important, and nothing matters quite so much as that whatever you say, you do so with attitude. The world is full of bland MOR types playing safe for fear of offending anybody and losing an audience who can’t pick them out amongst the crowd anyway.

How long can you imagine yourself doing this before you go completely insane?

‘Charlie’: Don’t know – just take it week by week. I don’t feel like I am going insane for the most part – but perhaps that’s because I am already there.

Wessely: I’m lucky in that I don’t have to do this all the time. I can take slushing breaks if real life gets too much. But seriously, I could do this forever – who wouldn’t, when the next story you read might be the biggest and best thing ever?

Battersby: I’m not slushing at the moment, mainly because there are no magazines with whom I have a working relationship and which I identify strongly enough with that I want to offer my services. If I had the time and money I’d be much more likely to run my own pet project over which I have some measure of control regarding the quality and style of the stories I publish. But if I had the time, and the right project came along, I’d consider it. It’s a good way to keep track of one’s own quality control.

Haynes: I already went insane and stopped.

A fine note to end on. My thanks to ‘Charlie’, Ms. Wessely, and Messrs. Haynes and Battersby for taking the time to respond to my questions.

For the ‘dedicated’ writers out there, vainly labouring on your little ditties, not yet ready to accept that I’m right — there are many valuable points raised here, a veritable checklist of mistakes you’re probably making. Did you spot them?

(I could list them, but that would just be enabling you.) 

How has your perspective changed since you began?

Wessely: Oh, I’m FAR more picky now than I used to be! I’m also much better at judging stories outside my own personal tastes. I try to be more critical of what I read, and I often think, “yes, it’s a good story, but is it GREAT? Is there something special about this that will appeal to an editor enough to fill pages with it?”

Haynes: Okay, at first I wanted to grab the almost-there stories and tell the authors how to fix them. But then they would have been my stories, not theirs. It’s not luck, it’s not who you know – just make sure your story has all the elements and is written as well as, or better than, the stories you’ve read in the mag. (If you haven’t read an issue of the mag you’re submitting to, you are so wasting your time.)

Battersby: I’m less tolerant of “lightweight” stories than I used to be. Short stories, in particular, have to confront and undermine the status quo, not reinforce it. Even if the author sets out to write a humorous quest fantasy with cheeky hobbit sidekicks (and may syphilis rot your descendants if you do), they need to act against the ‘comfort-eating’ aspects of literature. It’s a crowded field. Attitude counts.

‘Charlie’: I am more often tempted not to read the whole thing. I have come round to the opinion though that if a story can’t bring me in within the first four paragraphs then it is quite flawed. I do still read to the end to give the author a fair consideration of what I think could be improved if I am rejecting it. Basically, anything that causes me to be jolted out of the story world the author has created is a bad thing.

Tell me numbers. How many, how fast, how often, how few deserving of attention?

Wessely: ASIM is in the high 7000s for submissions [over] five and a half years, an average of around 1400 a year. Luckily I haven’t had to read them all myself! When I slush, I might read five or six a week usually, but a lot more when I’m editing [an upcoming issue].

Haynes: New slush readers often let through borderline stories because they think editors can work with the author to really turn an average story into something special. Well, editors already have a lot of good stories to choose from so this doesn’t happen very often. Out of 100, 80-90 are an immediate ‘no thanks’. Writing not up to scratch, no ending, no point, clone of a recent TV episode, gruesome horror, you name it. 10-20 are maybes, worth a second look by another reader. And sometimes one is a standout.

Battersby: In general, of every ten stories I read, maybe three will strike me as worth a second look. Of those three, maybe one in every nine or twelve will strike me as being something original. I’ve read a lot of SF over the years. Very few stories don’t have readily memorable precedents. For [magazine slush reading], I’d average a dozen or so stories a month, which isn’t a huge turnover by any means. Competitions are different. I’ve judged a few, and reading 100-120 stories in a fortnight wouldn’t be unusual.

‘Charlie’: All are deserving of attention but some get more than others. When a story really draws me in I still find myself reading it just for the pleasure of a good read.

What proportion of the slushpile is: Right for your market (whether or not it makes it)?

‘Charlie’: 90% 

Wessely: 2/7

Haynes: Most of it.

Battersby: Less than a third. Ultimately, outside of quote requirements, I’d probably publish 5-10% of stories I’ve received purely on their literary merits.

Wrong but otherwise publishable?

‘Charlie’: 5% 

Wessely: 1/7

Haynes: Very little. We’ve published some dark horror in the past, even though our guidelines discourage it. But if I’m slushing and I get a gross-out story with nasty elements to it, it’s a no and I don’t care how well written it is.

Battersby: Again, less than a third. A number of stories published by almost every magazine are published because of space requirements rather than the quality of the story itself, so there’s always a home for a competently written tale, even if it doesn’t fit my particular requirements.

Lacking a certain something?

‘Charlie’: 40% 

Wessely: 4/7

Haynes: Most of it. It’s a common fault.

Battersby: The vast majority. Anywhere up to 90% of stories, including many that I see in print, fulfil all the basic requirements of a competent story without possessing, in any way, anything to raise them above the rest of the slushpile. Such stories tend to find a readership because they don’t confront the reader, who’s seen it all before and isn’t afraid of it. Equally, if they never find a home, the author will be left scratching their head as to why, when the reason is as simple as the fact that the editor has seen it all before, and better. 

Sophomoric?

‘Charlie’: 10% 

Wessely: 2/7

Haynes: I don’t keep count. I used to read every story right to the bitter end, but after a while you get wily and give up after 3-4 pages, jump ahead 50 pages to see whether the farmboy is king yet, then zap the submission.

Battersby: Almost everybody goes through this phase, assuming they sell more than a story or two over the years. Stories in this category are probably the second largest variety I come across: the simple “I’ve read a lot of 50s SF” stuff; the “all-men are bad” feminist manifestoes, or worse, their male, anti-woman equivalents; the Bradbury clones; the Ellison clones; God help me, the Jordan clones. This stuff isn’t bad, per se. It’s just lazy and ignorant of history, and easily rejected.

Grossly incompetent?

‘Charlie’: 2% 

Wessely: 1/7

Haynes: Not really. It’s art, not mathematics or engineering, so measuring competence is hard unless you’re talking literacy (and I see you’re about to.)

Battersby: It happens. Anyone can write a story. Writing it well is another matter entirely. Most of the time, this kind of story is written by someone who has no idea about the genre they’ve chosen. If they continue to churn out such stuff, well, you don’t hear about them for very long.

Functionally illiterate?

‘Charlie’: 0% 

Wessely: 1/7

Haynes: Very little. Most of the subs are quite well- to very well written. You see some mags arguing that opening themselves up to electronic subs would lead to a swamp filled with poor quality mush, but we haven’t seen that.

Battersby: Very few, actually. It takes a rare type of self-belief to write something so abysmally bad and then couple it to a belief that it’s only good enough for the small and micro press. Most of the insanely awful creators bypass our level of the industry and go straight to inflicting their precious gifts upon the slushpiles of Asimov’s and F&SF. Once those markets reject them, they either lose heart or start paying more attention to the PublishAmerica ads.

(Part Three to follow.)

Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine is of course completely different, founded instead on the utterly absurd notion that the world needs more quality Australian short science fiction. They have, at least, made their submissions process fantastically complex – instead of a couple of no-talent hacks who’ve barely read the genre screening all the submissions by throwing them down a stairway and keeping the ones that land face up, they have … they … I’ll let them explain it:

When a story arrives it is entered into a submissions management program developed explicitly for Andromeda Spaceways, affectionately dubbed “Slush-o-matic”. The author details are stripped, and the story is then sent to a random reader. At this stage, the reader marks it with a “Yes”, “No”, or a “Maybe”. “No”s are sent back to the author (often with reader comments), “Maybe”s are sent to another random reader for a second opinion, and “Yes”s are send to round two.
In Round 2, the story sent to three different readers, each of whom gives it a rating between 1 and 5, with 1 being great and 5 being the opposite. Once all three second-round readers have rated the story, the ratings are added up, and compared to an arbitrary minimum number (which varies a bit depending on circumstances). At this stage, the reader will get either a Reject (with all the reader comments attached) or a Hold.
A Hold request means that your story has passed into the Round 3, and is in with a real chance. It means that your submission is considered good enough to go into an issue of  Andromeda Spaceways, and you should feel proud because it is in about the top 10% of all stories received. It will be placed in the luxurious Slushpool for the editors of upcoming issues to ogle. However, with the number of submissions we receive, only about 1 story in 3 makes it out of the Slushpool and into print. If no editor selects it within two-three months, the story is reluctantly booted out of the Slushpool and back to the author (again, with reader comments attached).

(Source)

Got that? What’s the bet the guy who came up with that works or used to work in public service?

Several of the members of the Round 1 Slush Reading Team (they have jerseys) agreed, nay volunteered, to be interviewed for my drawn-out and now appallingly overdue Slushpile Awareness Month. They are:

• Simon Haynes, biographer of the only man I would trust to move my furniture across the galaxy
• Lee Battersby, creator of fine short fiction and the accidental destroyer of fine novels-in progress
• Tehani Wessely, who may or may not be Tehani Croft (which either way sounds like a variation on delicious Indian dish, as prepared by an English chef), and
• ‘Charlie’, my pseudonym for an interviewee who wishes anonymity.

I’ve combined the interviews, to heighten the suspense.

What is your experience with slush reading?

Wessely: I’ve been slushreading off and on for ASIM for almost six years, since the publishing group that produces it formed and opened for submissions in 2001.

Haynes: I read Slush for ASIM from issue 1 until … lord, I can’t remember. The bells, the bells.

Battersby: I sub-edited an issue of ASIM (#11), was a slush reader for Ideomancer, and was submissions editor for Ticonderoga Online. I’m currently at large.

‘Charlie’: Overall very positive. I enjoy getting the chance to give feedback to writers and to read the stories before they get to the magazine.

How on earth did you get roped in to it, and what makes you do it?

Wessely: As a founding member of the Andromeda Spaceways Publishing Co-operative Ltd, slushing was simply part of what we did. I still do it when I can, because I edit for ASIM regularly and it’s the best way to find absolute gems that come through the slush.

Haynes: At the time it was part and parcel of being involved in the magazine. Then I realised I could take on other tasks like maintaining the subs list, printing all the envelopes, posting all the magazines and maintaining the website, and so I did those instead. More work, less stress.

Battersby: With ASIM, I was dating the editor, and stepped into the breach when the person who was supposed to be sub-editing withdrew from the issue in order to concentrate on her own upcoming volume of the magazine.

‘Charlie’: Another slusher friend invited me to join. It works to spur on my own work and I do make comparisons like ‘If this is getting through then surely my stories would be worth sending in!’

What qualifies you to judge other people’s babies?

Wessely: I think you’re only as qualified as you think you are! I’ve been reading in the speculative fiction arena for over 15 years. I know what I like, and I also know what gets published, done to death, well reviewed, bagged severely, awarded –  I try to use this knowledge to form an idea of what editors might be able to use, for whatever the reason.

Haynes: I can tell whether something works or not. I’ve had short fiction published in ASIM, and you’d have to admit that gives me an insight into what the mag will and won’t print. (And no, I didn’t have to slush my own slush.)

Battersby: A degree in Writing, 50-plus stories in print, and a fair record in the teaching and reviewing of writing, would be the serious answer, I guess. In practical terms, it’s important to have a strong view on what makes a good story, an innate understanding of the terms of reference of the magazine’s guidelines (in my experience, just because an editorial team can pronounce words like ‘pulp’ or ‘gonzo’, it doesn’t necessarily follow that they understand what the words mean).

‘Charlie’: I am offering judgement but I see it more as an appraisal. I am a writer too, I offer other writers the level of courtesy and consideration I would like to think my work gets when I send it in.

(Part Two to follow.)

More than that, Spencer Ellsworth was once one of you.

As an unpublished writer now reading slush for little more than kudos, I was keen to hear his opinion on the process of sifting the slushpile for the rare submission that’s even worth an agent’s attention. So when he volunteered to be interviewed, well naturally I jumped at the chance after a few weeks. When he submitted his responses via email, I immediately moved them to the Maybe pile.

If you’re curious about the slush process, and just how long it takes a new reader to become jaded, read on. (If you’re not curious, that might explain why you’re still unpublished, and why your writing is like a grainy photocopy of a nineteenth century potboiler.)

101 Reasons: So, what qualifies you to judge other people’s babies? (I mean, a *lot* of people have an English degree.)

That’s a good question. I helped birth and nurture a science fiction magazine in college [UVSC], called Warp and Weave. I attended a by-audition-only writing workshop, Orson Scott Card’s 2005 Literary Boot Camp, which parleyed me into the Codex Writer’s Group, where I met Jenny [Rappaport] and critiqued some of her stories. Obviously that was my best criteria, because Jenny recommended me to Lori [Perkins].

What proportion of Perkins’ 30,000 queries/year is your responsibility? How many, how fast, how often, how few deserving of attention?

The proportion changes depending on how busy Lori/Jenny are with their other clients. Each week Jenny and Lori send me around 50 emails. That’s not much, but remember that in my first week they sent me a combined total of three hundred from their backlog. And I’ve only been doing this for a month, part-time.

Out of those, I’ve asked for partials from forty percent of the queries. It’s not hard to write a decent query. But of those partials, I’ve sent two on to Jenny and Lori, and requested rewrites from three. The rest I quit on around the third page.

How has your perspective changed since the first week?

My first day I made a list of “maybe queries” and set them aside. At the end of the day I looked at them and realized that they were all rejection material for one reason or another, and I had been trying to find reasons to keep them.

Having written several slush novels, it still hurts me to reject someone’s baby, even if they can’t use gerunds correctly or insert a comma every four words. But there’s no use in flawed but interesting queries. I’m better off rejecting anything that looks like it might not make it. If I let it through, it’ll be worse when Jenny or Lori or a publisher doesn’t take it.

How long did it take to establish a rhythm or routine?

I’m still working on that. I can go through about twenty emails an hour just saying “send me a partial” or “Thanks, but not for us.” Rejecting partials is harder. I often don’t read past the first three pages, so they get a note that says something like “It didn’t grab me” or that references some good technique for beginning writers, like “don’t introduce more than two characters in your first scene.” But there are a few that are almost there, so I give detailed critiques on those, because I want the writers to make the changes and send them back. I have to care a lot to write a detailed critique.

Barring agent’s tastes, industry vagaries and market forces, how many books are “good enough” to be published?

Out of three hundred queries, I passed along two to Lori and Jenny. Then of course, they have to like them, an editor has to like them, and a publishing house has to buy them. Two.

How far “out there” do some people go? Worst/strangest/most elaborate?

There are some rules on queries that everyone should know. Don’t tell me how much your mother loved it. Don’t tell me “I know agents ignore queries from unknown writers…” (So you know we’re a snob club and you want in?)

One guy mentioned that he was extremely handsome and could eat X pieces of bacon in one sitting. He got a partial request, not because of that, but because his novel sounded funny.

If you could add some clauses to the submission guidelines, what would they be?

This is assuming that people read the submission guidelines? Because if they did, they would see that Lori prefers the first five pages be pasted into the query, but NO ONE DOES IT.

I would probably add some information that I’ve said before: make sure your grammar is perfect, give information about character, conflict and setting, don’t introduce too many characters at once, don’t use omniscient voice, show, don’t tell, make your characters likeable, and present a compelling situation right off the bat.

How has reading the slushpile impacted your own writing, and your opinion of publishing?

Slushing is the easy way to learn to recognize mistakes in your own writing-easy in the sense that you hit yourself over the head with others’ mistakes. I can see now which ideas are worth it and which are crap, or tell when I’ve really screwed up a story. Of course, it’s much harder to let go and draft, because my inner editor has become a beast from overfeeding.

Publishing-I actually feel sorry for them. There is so much slush. The first time I had a novel rejected, at the age of 21, I thought, “They could at least take the time to really look at it. It’s good once you get into it.” If I had known how deluged the publishing world was by first-timers with those same thoughts, I would have cried for them. And I would have gone back and revised my novel.

How long can you imagine yourself doing this before you go completely insane?

What?  I couldn’t hear you over the worms.
Seriously, I love slush. I just wish there were less of it. Like, one-tenth.

My thanks to Spencer for this interview. I love his use of ’slushing’ as a verb.

Those of you who believe 101 Reasons is intended as reverse psychology may observe that the collective advice and commentary herein is more useful to your goal of getting through the slush stage than Lori Perkins’ business card with a handwritten direct phone number. If you feel you haven’t learned something, then it’s probably time for you to stop writing, and save Spencer the half-minute it would take to determine that your work is an uninspired collection of basic errors. If you think you’re already following his advice, then you’re running out of reasons to justify your failure. 

It was specified that a response had to be received. Otherwise, 97% would choose the “Never” option, because they’re still waiting for a response from Hopelessly Underfunded Spur-of-the-Moment Vanity Project #1 and Harlan Ellison’s The Last Dangerous Visions.

Shout out to Nathan’s homies. ‘Other’ responses included specific periods (3 months and 6 months), one respondent who misunderstood the exclusion on ‘Never’, and one respondent who had to beat a answer from an editor. I imagine it was a ‘No’.

The most important result is that 31% of you have not submitted for publication yet — so there’s still hope! Stop writing now while you can still deny you ever entertained this ridiculous fantasy.

There’s also a bunch of you who are fsckin’ liars — no-one submitted more stories to the same publisher while waiting to hear about the first one?

This poll has been reopened. The ‘Other’ option has been removed because the current polling system doesn’t support it.

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.

What’s the longest you’ve ever had to wait for a response to a submission? Note that I said response. 97% of people voting for “I’m still waiting” just isn’t funny.

Vote in the sidebar.

Please note: the ‘Other’ option only takes about 100 characters. Your opus will be truncated.

There is a myth about publishing, propagated and regularly renewed by bad writers desperate to justify their futile reveries. The self-sustaining power of the myth is such that writers in its thrall cannot see, much less correct the basic problems in their writing — problems so fundamental, the writers are forever doomed to get form rejections that don’t alert them to how severe these problems are. This myth is:

Publishers employ copy editors to fix the spelling and grammar in your manuscript.

This myth is pervasive because in the most literal sense, it is true. Publishers do employ copy editors, and their role (in part) is to fix errors of spelling and grammar during a book’s pre-publication phase. But in the funhouse mirror that is the bad writer’s state of perpetual denial, this simple fact has been tortured into a comforting, yet utterly untrue corollary:

It dont mater how bad is my speling or grammar, cause thats’ what copyeditors is for.

And thus a sizeable proportion of every slushpile is comprised of randomly, punctuate’d, fonetikly riten first drafts so bad, so head-shakingly wrong that they would make proofreaders weep and copyeditors resign, if they didn’t initially make slush readers shudder with fear as they drop the submission into the Burn This pile.

I don’t think it’s much of a secret that this is the fault of the massive wussification of education in Western countries over the last forty years. After the peace movement of the 1960s, the powers that be decided that kids were getting too darn smart, and a smart kid was much less likely to say “sure Mister President, I’ll spend six weeks learning to field-strip an M-16 and having my sense of self systematically destroyed so I can be sent to murder some poor, ill-trained conscripted suckers with a different skin color trying to defend their country with outdated weapons you sold to them before you decided that stealing their natural resources was cheaper than buying them”. It’s far easier to maintain a massive standing army ready to fight and die for no reason other than “the President says it’s cool” if you don’t teach them to think for themselves in the first place.

So, now we’re on the second generation of kids who are getting a free pass through the school system while barely learning to read and write at a functional level. The frightening thing is that some of them still think they can be writers — while the saddening thing is that if the education system was designed to develop intelligent and capable citizens instead of consumers and soldiers, they could have been writers.

Some of them (surely) have interesting lives, and strong ideas — it’s just that they lack the linguistic capability to express themselves, and what’s left of today’s reading public have less and less patience to wade through books that read like they were typed by throwing pebbles at a keyboard across the room.

And — here’s the kicker — for the same reasons, skilled copyeditors are now rarer and more expensive than when your high-school-dropout granddaddy was nurtured by his publisher through a long and unremarkable midlist career. Publishers are desperate for the Next Big Thing, and they’re prepared to spend even less money on even more books than ever before. So, while slushpile manuscripts are getting worse, less money and time is being put into polishing the rough gems. These days it’s write well, and sell well, or get the hell out.

(You might wonder, if literacy levels are dropping, why you can’t write for people who are just as illiterate as you. Simple answer: illiterate people don’t buy books. The people who do buy books love words enough to recognize lots of them.)

If you’re one of these writers, with great ideas and a passion for writing but lacking confidence in spelling and grammar, you’re just fscked. Give up. You’re wasting your time writing when you should be reading — Modern English Usage, preferably, but at least read the spelling suggestions and grammar warnings in your word processor.

To help you figure out if you’re in this category, here are some different types of spelling errors, ranked in increasing order of ineptitude:

1. Typos. Everyone makes the occasional tpyo. See? Especially in web forums and blog comments. Only the most pedantic grammar nazis get a bug in the butt over a few typos (and pedantic grammar nazis only buy new editions of OED anyway, so who gives a fsck what they think). They’re easily fixed (the typos, not the nazis). But it’s a problem if you make:
2. Consistent Typos. These are actually:
3. Words You Don’t Know How To Spell Correctly. This category includes Words You Spell Phonetically. This is where it gets bad, because it demonstrates that you haven’t read widely enough to see these words spelled correctly. You may be forgiven a (very) few of these, as the intended meaning will probably be understood. But agents will reach for the form letter when they find:
4. Words You Don’t Know How To Use Properly. This includes tortured phrases like intensive purposes and classic mistakes like its/it’s and their/there/they’re. They’re very simple rules, kids, and it’s a shame you keep breaking them.

This last category is the (slush)killer, the “auto-no”, the point at which your manuscript may simply become unreadable. They’re especially dangerous because spellcheck software won’t pick them up; indeed you may only discover them when a patient and better-educated friend looks up from your manuscript and says “What the fsck does this mean?”

Really, if you’re going to write in English, you’re expected to understand it. Category four blunders are like interrupting a serious conversation to tell a bad joke: people might ignore one and pause politely for two, but three or more and someone’s going to throw something at you. You should be glad at this point that your manuscript didn’t get published — a hardcover hurts more.

The “slushpile” is a necessary evil in the publishing industry. Depending on your role, it may be more necessary than evil. To misquote Winston Churchill, “it may be the worst form of [submission process], except all those others that have been tried from time to time.”

Agents, editors and other slush readers regularly claim that the thrill of finding that one quality submission makes up for the slog through thousands of sub-literate cookie-cutter knockoffs, in the same way that telemarketers claim that the one person who says “why yes, I am interested in changing my long-distance carrier” makes up for the thousands of hangups, death threats and “why don’t you get a real job, you cold-calling motherfscker”. But you know if it really was that exciting, they’d read through it faster.

Writers, of course, hate the slushpile, but at the same time they hope to float to the top of it. They want the slushpile to work (for them), mostly because they’re too lazy to self-publish, and they just want to win the Next Big Thing lottery. But they hate the whole submission process, because it forces them to accept that people cannot see between the words on the page to what they “really meant”.

The problem with the slushpile isn’t the capriciousness of editors, the sadism of agents or the philistinism of slush readers — it’s the incapacity of the bottom 99% to realise that they are nowhere near the top 0.1%.

I’m calling for a Slushpile Armistice, an end to the partisan bitterness which prevents people on both sides from properly accepting blame for their part in the slow downfall of publishing.

Here’s what you can do.

Writers

1. Remember, and repeat as necessary: The slushpile is not the enemy. You are. What’s keeping you in the slushpile is your inability to detect the flaws in your execution.
2. Stop submitting. At least, give your work the redraft you know it needs.
3. Go through the list of agents and editors you routinely submit to, and delete the ones that don’t take the genre you write.
4. Read and follow the submission guidelines.
5. Just stop submitting.

Agents/Editors/Slush Readers

1. Before you open the next query or submission, take a moment to reflect that this represents the hopes and dreams of another human being. Perhaps this is their first submission, and there’s an actual piece of their soul embedded in the words. Perhaps they’ve been down this road enough times to have their own postal worker, and they’re only one “Not right for us” away from seeing if the nearest emergency room takes unsolicited submissions. Whoever they are, they’re somewhere on the continuum between youthful naïveté and paranoiac despair, and no matter how carefully you word your response, it’s going to push them a little further toward the latter.
   Fsck ‘em. Your listing in Writer’s Market might say “accepts unsolicited submissions”, but that wasn’t meant as an invitation to shred a Harry Potter hardcover and randomly glue the pieces together. You shouldn’t have to waste time putting a form rejection into an SASE to let the same writer know for the fourth time that your company publishes peer-reviewed psychology articles and has no plans to expand into young adult SF erotica. You shouldn’t have to deal with the health implications of submissions written in human blood, not always belonging to the writer.
2. Blog frequently about the downside of working the slushpile. Maybe some of them will take the fscking hint.
3. Work with your peers to develop a form rejection letter completely bereft of emotion or subtext. I’m sure you know a few writers who could help.
4. Insist on a signed disclaimer, available on your website, indicating the writer has read and adhered to the submission guidelines. Change the date on it every month.
5. Stop publishing the mediocre junk that makes each new generation of bad writers think they have a shot

Our target this year: to reduce the average slushpile by 25%. Let’s put aside our differences and fight the good fight, people.