Rejectomancy

Kaitlin Brianna said:

No one really owes us anything.

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No one owes anyone basic courtesy. However, if one doesn't exercise it, one shouldn't be surprised when he/she gets called names.

It's really very simple. As CL has correctly put it, slush reading is a job. Yes, it's unpaid, and yes, it's your own choice whether to take it or not. Thus:

--If you do take the job and you can't muster enough mental energy to perform it on the weekdays, instead shifting all of the load to Saturdays and then mindlessly grinding through the heap of manuscripts that has amassed itself on your desk--then, pardon my French, you suck at this particular job.
--It is not a bad thing in itself, we all suck at something--but once you realize your own unsuitability, you should inform your employers and step down, freeing the place for someone more motivated and perhaps more capable.
--If you still retain the job, making up excuses for your behaviour, then you'll be rightfully called... something.

Just to clarify: things I wrote above are general considerations, applicable to any job.

I know where you're coming from, but I guess I accept some more leeway with slush readers and editors, especially those who are volunteering or receiving token pay at smaller publications. So many of these publications are half business, half labor of love.

I once volunteered as a reader for a novel contest. I was honestly floored by the number of submissions that had an inordinate amount of basic English problems: run-on sentences galore, homonym issues out the wazoo, and that doesn't even touch basic punctuation and capitalization problems. I have to be honest and say that I rejected those by the end of the first paragraph. My heart goes out to the slush readers who wade through the stacks and stacks of submissions like that.

My only wish is that they (slush readers) had a slightly wider variety of forms for rejection. There's nothing a writer can really do about being #112 today of the same type of story, but if it's due to a preponderance of grammar issues or some other easily remediated skill deficiency it might improve the level of submissions to be better than soul-killing.

So right, CharlyT. It would be immeasurably helpful if readers had like one sentence they could paste in regarding reason for rejection, even if it's blunt: grammar, doesn't hold interest, similar to other purchased stories, etc.

vintager said:

Absolutely, Ty!
BTW is there a list somewhere of such markets? I know of only one, namely F&$F where the great C.C.F. is slaving away at the moment.

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Last year, Neil Clarke said at a con he's still reading ~70% of the Clarkesworld slush himself. I do believe Scott Andrews chews through a healthy percentage of the BCS slush, too. It seems like pro/semipro shops are either one incredibly motivated iconoclast, or a loose collective.

What I don't understand is, why then do slush-reading in the first place? Does it open the road to eventually becoming an editor yourself? If so, why would a person whose dream is to become an editor shift the work to Saturdays?

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From what I've read, reading slush for almost any length of time gives you an immediate insight into just HOW OFTEN people make a lot of the same mistakes, and HOW UBIQUITOUS some of the common guideline-mandated no-nos are. You also get a great feel for what everyone's submitting (still zombies, Clarke tweeted the other day, despite putting "zombies and zombie wanna-bes" at the very tip-top of his Hard Sell list with a parenthetical "seriously, I'm not kidding"), which lets you zig when everyone else is zagging.

I'd really like to dip my toe in to slush-reading sometime soon to gain that insight, but during the NFL season/school & kid-activity season it's a non-starter.

Peace
Ty

DetectiveFork said:

I know where you're coming from, but I guess I accept some more leeway with slush readers and editors, especially those who are volunteering or receiving token pay at smaller publications. So many of these publications are half business, half labor of love.

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I totally agree! I was speaking mostly in relation to the heavyweight guys, like $trang3 H0riz0n$.

CharlyT said:

My only wish is that they (slush readers) had a slightly wider variety of forms for rejection. There's nothing a writer can really do about being #112 today of the same type of story, but if it's due to a preponderance of grammar issues or some other easily remediated skill deficiency it might improve the level of submissions to be better than soul-killing.

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DetectiveFork said:

So right, CharlyT. It would be immeasurably helpful if readers had like one sentence they could paste in regarding reason for rejection, even if it's blunt: grammar, doesn't hold interest, similar to other purchased stories, etc.

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I think the problem here is--correct me if I'm wrong--that in most magazines, slushers are not granted the powers of rejection. What they do is they pass the story to an editor (assistant one or a managing editor) with a short review (didn't like the first scene! the pace is outrageously slow! it was Saturday and I was tired!) and a recommendation to drop it. The editor then sends out the actual rejection without reading the story.

Naturally, as an editor, you wouldn't want to put your own signature under someone else's words--which you didn't even have the chance to verify.

Ty Schalter said:

Last year, Neil Clarke said at a con he's still reading ~70% of the Clarkesworld slush himself.

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That totally came out of the left field for me! I thought he had an army of drones working on the manuscripts.

Ty Schalter said:

I do believe Scott Andrews chews through a healthy percentage of the BCS slush, too.

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I do tend to get similarly tailored rejections from BCS. "Beautiful writing," "loved the feel of the world," and then "intangible" (this one seems to be a must), "didn't coalesce" and "not as much A as I needed to feel B". Is this Sc0tt Andrew$' handwriting?

Ty Schalter said:

I'd really like to dip my toe in to slush-reading sometime soon to gain that insight, but during the NFL season/school & kid-activity season it's a non-starter.

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That's what I call a sense of responsibility. You don't go like "Yeah there's a lot of kid-related stuff on the horizon... Aaaah doesn't matter, I'll sign up anyway... Monday-Tuesday-Wednesday-Thursday-Friday: no time, no time... Saturday: why do these bastards send in so many manuscripts?! Don't they have anything better to do?!"

I don't think slush readers should 'have' to read on the weekdays. It's a job, and surely it's up to their 'employer' (whether paying them or not) to say when they should read. I suspect many see it as hiring freelancers, so as long as the job gets done correctly, they don't actually mind when it's done.

I don't think any of us are owed weekday reading. Most people in publishing, agents and editors alike, do heavy reading at home, there's just no time in the working day.

Of course if you can't do the work in a timely fashion - meaning getting through the amount of submissions as required by your employers, then yeah, it's time to realise it may not be the job for you.

Fwiw I have read slush as an employed editorial assistant as well as freelance (books not magazines though) and the urge to procrastinate is always there, as well as the eagerness to find the next great story!

As a writer I started off aiming for the quick response markets. Nowadays, as I am beginning to run out of markets for some stories, I'm quite happy to have some at the slower markets so I get a bit of breathing space between Rs and getting ready to submit elsewhere!

mistri said:

As a writer I started off aiming for the quick response markets. Nowadays, as I am beginning to run out of markets for some stories, I'm quite happy to have some at the slower markets so I get a bit of breathing space between Rs and getting ready to submit elsewhere!

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Please don't get me wrong; I couldn't care less for response times. If a slusher leaves all the work for a Saturday and then does the said work thoroughly, with great care and consideration, I'd be totally happy. I'd be happy to wait for months if I was convinced my story would get a fair treatment. Only I know people, and this isn't the scenario that's likely to happen.

An editor would do that. Probably. An editor would see a heap of manuscripts on a Saturday morning and say: "Hey, that's a lot of work. Tell you what: I'll chain my ass to the chair for the next 10, 12, 14 hours--I'll invest as much time as needed."

Would a slusher do the same? As the work keeps piling up, doesn't it produce a certain discouraging effect on people? Aren't they likely to put off the moment of starting to work as much as possible?

As weeks go by, I usually become more and more convinced that my piece landed with a 'Saturday slusher.' This hypothetical person will get to my story, sure, and then this person will devote a whole of two minutes to it. I couldn't immediately understand why the characters were worried, so I ditched your piece, sorry. After all, there are 50 more manuscripts on my table right now, and they all require my attention.

Who cares? The stories that make it through will still be good. A first reader is judged by the quality of his/her acceptances, not his/her rejections; as long as the pieces he/she recommends are solid, the editors will be happy.

vintager said:

As weeks go by, I usually become more and more convinced that my piece landed with a 'Saturday slusher.' This hypothetical person will get to my story, sure, and then this person will devote a whole of two minutes to it.

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Well, yeah. But is that necessarily a bad thing? How much time do you think your average reader spends on a given story before skipping to the next? As a reader, two minutes is enough for me to decide whether or not I want to invest further time in reading a story.

Personally, I find it helps to think of slush readers less like gate keepers and more like an audience. If I can't hold a (potentially distracted) audience's attention for more than two minutes with a particular story, something in my story needs reworked.

CL_Hilbert said:

Personally, I find it helps to think of slush readers less like gate keepers and more like an audience. If I can't hold a (potentially distracted) audience's attention for more than two minutes with a particular story, something in my story needs reworked.

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CL, I respect you, but I think you're way off the mark here. And it's distressing because many other first readers must feel the same way.

When I sit down with a book, or indeed a magazine, I'm in a certain mood. I welcome the prose. This mood perhaps can be approximated if you devote some of your time to a story after a hard day's work; this mood is markedly different from the one you get when you glance at a heap of 50 manuscripts on a Saturday. If you've been to a college, I'm sure you know the latter feel from the last day before an exam.

If the Saturday slusher represents some mythical audience, I sure as hell don't want to write for it.

CL_Hilbert said:

How much time do you think your average reader spends on a given story before skipping to the next?

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Me--about five seconds. If, however, I decide to stay, and something suddenly feels off to me--for whatever reason--I won't be going: "Piiiing! Grounds for rejection! Next one!" I'll read some more, see if this was perhaps intentional, or maybe if I missed something.

Fifty-one-day, second round rejection from Andromeda Spaceways and not even any personal comments like they usually offer. Very disappointing. Accompanied by a form rejection from Uncanny. Morning's off to a great start. I'm starting to really think I don't have it.

DetectiveFork said:

Fifty-one-day, second round rejection from Andromeda Spaceways and not even any personal comments like they usually offer. Very disappointing. Accompanied by a form rejection from Uncanny. Morning's off to a great start. I'm starting to really think I don't have it.

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Oh come on! Is it your 14-days rejection sitting there at the GRNDR? Tell you what--I got one at 12 days A form one, too.

vintager said:

Oh come on! Is it your 14-days rejection sitting there at the GRNDR? Tell you what--I got one at 12 days A form one, too.

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It's actually the 51-day Andromeda Spaceways rejection that really got to me. They were totally silent for a month and my story was in Round 2. Then they come back to life and reject it without even a hint of a reason. I thought my writing and that mag had the same vibe, but I guess not in this case. Uncanny wasn't a huge surprise, I guess, and hadn't gone long enough for me to start really hoping. lol

Sorry about that, Detective. (That's a fun handle, so there's always that!) Chin up.

And a 44-day form from Unc@nny for me!

Sorry, Bethany. Plenty of disappointment to share today! And thanks! Detective Fork was a comic strip I drew for a long time (yes, about a crime-solving piece of cutlery).

We just dust and move on. Love the story, it's already out. Wrote 1200 words today. Life is good.

- - - Updated - - -

Okay, just processed the whole "crime-solving-cutlery" part of that.

Uncanny R (no surprise), and a 109-day form R from Cr0ssed Genres. I was really hoping for that one, it matched their theme so well. It was already rejected by a number of pro markets, though. I don't know if I should keep trying with it or just let this one go.

I'm afraid the next few Rs on top of this are going to seriously hurt.

Sympathy for all. I got my 44-day Uncanny today as well. I saw the others pop up on Grinder and knew it would be waiting for me when I got home.

Anyone else fighting the ire that rises whenever you glance at your email and see, yet again, a preview that basically reads, "Thank you for submitting X story. Unfortunately..."

I don't get angry at rejections. I have my email client set to my personal email on the main window so I can't see the actual emails (unless they come in while I happen to be staring), which means I play a 'who's rejected me today?' game. Then I am sometimes sad but not angry. And it means I'm pleasantly surprised if I get spam or something instead of a rejection!

DetectiveFork said:

Anyone else fighting the ire that rises whenever you glance at your email and see, yet again, a preview that basically reads, "Thank you for submitting X story. Unfortunately..."

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Ire is exactly the right word. I get high levels of it whenever I see just the 'thank you for submitting ...' Because I know what'll follow ...
Though I don't fight the ire, I embrace it