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| Hearsay: |
Maud points to this piece at VQR that highlights some particularly low moments in the lives of their first line editorial people: readers. A list of notes included with read submissions gives a good sense of the range of pain one can go through while panning the slush pile.
- “Soon he fitted his body into mine like a puzzle piece.” NONONONONONONONONO!
- Planet of the Apes fan-fiction! Have we no standards?
- Why does the speaker’s wife only want babies from Chinese shacks? This is the craziest poem. And the scariest. I feel like we should the call the cops on this guy. (There should be a category called “Inappropriate to Humanity.”)
- Unpublished Faulkner. Should remain unpublished.
- I can’t enumerate all the ways in which this is horrible.
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May 1st, 2008 at 9:00 am
It’s funny, one author complained to me how unfair to authors that this is, perceiving this list as something that puffs up readers and makes them feel important for their position. It’s gratifying to see that you appreciate the point here: that reading from the slush pile is precisely the opposite of glamorous. It’s the literary equivalent of mucking out stalls, to use a metaphor a bit more relevant to my own life. :)
May 1st, 2008 at 11:23 am
You have to wonder about folks who go to the trouble and expense of editing and publishing a magazine and complain about having to read submissions, though.
May 1st, 2008 at 11:37 am
I don’t think they were complaining about reading submissions, but rather about reading bad submissions. Unless you’ve actually been elbow deep in a slush pile, you can’t possibly imagine how ridiculous it gets. I used to run a small fiction mag and one day I swore that if I had to read one more story written from the perspective of a beloved pet, I would burn the whole fucking pile. Luckily, I folded before then. My co-editor (now my wife) and I used to both read everything, just to make sure we weren’t missing out on anything. A common comment when passing the manuscript was “See how far you can get.”
May 1st, 2008 at 12:56 pm
“Were you in the shit, Bookninja?”
“Yeah. I was in the shit.”
May 1st, 2008 at 12:58 pm
We’re not complaining about reading submissions, only sharing a bit of what it’s like to read submissions by people who clearly have never read a single page of VQR.
By the time our reading period closes on May 31, we will have received 10,400 submissions since our period opened on September 1. We published 160 in the same period.
May 1st, 2008 at 1:06 pm
There’s just something about reading a story about using a dog’s testicles as a bungee cord that sucks a little bit of the life out of you. I think most writers have no idea what editors see in the run of a day. It’s great when you find that one story you love but some days it’s hard to slog through the pile and you start to wonder if there is anything good there at all.
May 1st, 2008 at 1:13 pm
I found ninja K in that same slush pile. So good does come of it. Though I was deep in the shit, Max.
May 1st, 2008 at 1:25 pm
Submissions. Pshaw. I wish! Try reading high school English ‘essays.’ Try reading high school English ’stories.’ A pet as narrator? At least that story had a narrator. Really, how much money goes into public education and we rarely graduate students who can speak, read and write in one language, let alone the two we are supposed to officially speak.
Phew. Am breathing now. Am taking a break from marking.