To start off the new year, I’m officially announcing the launch of my second publishing company, Endless Sky Books. Whereas my first publishing company, Shadowpaw Press, is and always will be a traditional publishing company, …
For the first time, you can now buy the entire Shards of Excalibur series in a single omnibus ebook! Just released by Shadowpaw Press, this includes the latest editions of the books, and costs only half …
The Tangled Stars, my far-future humorous space opera from DAW Books, is now available everywhere in ebook and audiobook (narrated by Wayne Mitchell). For an introduction to the main characters, check out “Thibauld’s Tale” in …
Shapers of Worlds Volume III, the third anthology I’ve Kickstarted that features science fiction and fantasy by authors who were guests on my Aurora Award-winning podcast, The Worldshapers, has now officially been released upon the …
This is the latest in my occasional column about writing science fiction and fantasy that appears in the Saskatchewan Writers Guild magazine Freelance. Authors who are regularly interviewed often profess to hate one particular question, …
At When Words Collide 2022, one of the panels I led featured a handful of the many authors whose stories have appeared in the Shapers of Worlds anthologies I Kickstarted (and who have also, of …
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The shocking truth about the slush pile…
…is revealed by one buried beneath it:
It was my first job out of university: I was bright-eyed and idealistic and imagined that I might become some kind of beneficent tweedy sprite, conveying the writing of unknown literary artistes to the masses. By the time I left my job in publishing a few weeks ago, my idealism was in tatters, destroyed by the piles of typescripts I received from people who told me that their fondest desire was to write full time while sitting in a villa overlooking the Mediteranian, despite the fact that they didn’t know how to spell it.
Of course, the “shocking truth” is that most of the stuff that rolls in unsolicited to any kind of publisher anywhere is terrible. Nothing shocking about it, I would have thought. I’ve known it ever since I worked at the Weyburn Review and we, despite not publishing poetry (newspapers in general just aren’t really a big poetry market these days) received the poem with the memorable lines (they must have been memorable, because I still remember them) commemorating the sad tale of the woman who couldn’t flag down another car after hers was sidelined by a fire:
She works in the grocery, sometimes crossing the street at a run.
She’s always in a hurry to get things done.
As she was heading home late one night to retire
She did not expect her car to go on fire!
Permanent link to this article: https://edwardwillett.com/2007/05/the-shocking-truth-about-the-slush-pile/