Well, I did it again: led the Seven-Sentence Short Story workshop (created by science fiction and fantasy author James van Pelt) at a writing conference, this time, Wordbridge in Lethbridge, Alberta. Here’s the story I …
It’s time for this year’s Kickstarter to fund Shapers of Worlds Volume V, the fifth in the series of anthologies featuring science fiction and fantasy by authors who were guests on my Aurora Award-winning podcast, The …
It takes money to publish books, and most of that money flows out the door before the book is released and sales begin, so my publishing company, Shadowpaw Press, is turning to Crowdfundr to help …
Shapers of Worlds Volume IV, the fourth anthology featuring authors who were guests on my podcast, The Worldshapers, is now available everywhere, including directly from Shadowpaw Press. Here’s a handy universal URL with links to …
My publishing company, Shadowpaw Press, has three great titles coming out in the first two months of 2024, all of them science fiction or fantasy. The first two, The Good Soldier by Nir Yaniv and …
Here’s another seven-sentence short story! I ran the workshop again at Ganbatte, an anime convention in Saskatoon. It went well, and here’s the one I created, again with the instructions, created by noted SF short-story …
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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/