Talking to my mama the other night and she asked if the road construction outside our house was done yet. As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. So here’s three thousand words worth:
Or to answer in three words, “No, not yet.”
In addition to retooling the website, I’m also slushing at UW-Milwaukee’s literary magazine The Cream City Review. This is the first time I’ve ever read slush before. It’s a strange experience being on this side of the fence.
I have to read 40 submissions before the end of the year or I get a slap on the wrist. No problem. Dudes like the Slushgod and Slushmaster do this in an afternoon. So I went through the first ten. Right off the bat, there were only a couple that used standard manuscript format, by that I mean Times New Roman, one-inch margins, page numbered, and SASE for response. One had no SASE. One submitted three stories in one packet and used A11 paper. All of the cover letters save one were far too long; there’s something about talking up a story in the cover letter that inspires pity. I cringe when I look at the cover letters I sent out when I first started writing. They looked like a lot of these.
The writing, however, was far better than I expected. Only one didn’t make it past the first page because of the writing. What I saw most often was waffling in the storytelling. Too much meandering or repeating an idea, only saying it slightly differently, and otherwise being dull “slice of life” scenes. And for the two that avoided all of these pitfalls within the first third of the story, they were just too damn long and not interesting enough. One was 8K words. I jotted the dreaded “Nice writing here but failed to hold my interest” note on the form rejection. Because it was true.
The other lesson I’m learning is the utter crapshoot nature of winging a story off to a literary market. There’s something like a dozen fiction slushers who pass stories up to the main editorial trio. They make the final call, buying about six (!) stories for our bi-annual magazine. One of the stories that I rejected but sorta liked had to do with a girl finding a froggy-mermaid thing. Why that one? Because I generally like fantasy-ish stories. The other slushers may hate that stuff, so it’s a 1-in-12 chance for writers with speculative inclinations to get me as their favorable first reader. And it still has to get past two of the three main editors before it would be published.
As a writer, this makes me want to save my stamp money and buy lottery tickets instead.
I told my buddy the other day that I’ve finally hit the pinnacle of my writing career: I’m broke and I’m writing overly-complicated stories that no one seems to understand.
Rare is the rejection letter that makes me laugh, but I got one this weekend. The editor (who I like and respect) took the time to point out parts of my story that were confusing or didn’t seem to make sense, and mentioned that the story was somewhat repetitive and unresolved. That doesn’t sound so funny, now does it? The funny part is that I used this story for part of my final project for my Masters exam. One of my professors said it was his favorite story of the bunch because of its heavily “modernist” tendencies. The positives he mentioned? How the confusing parts lacked any explanation and how the story itself was cyclical and unresolved, just like the plight of the protagonists.
Which in all honesty was exactly what I was going for. I didn’t think it would fly at the spec fic markets I usually send to, and so far it hasn’t (and there’s only one “major” market left). And that’s a-okay. This all speaks to how the story isn’t broken, it just has to find the appropriate market, and that may be in the literary magazine realm rather than the speculative one.
Current Mood: Okay | 
Currently Listening To – Oasis – “Standing On the Shoulders of Giants”
6 Comments
Now, depending on your sources, Standard Manuscript format may mean Courier (a non-proportional font) instead of Times New Roman (a proportional font), so you have to be careful about declarations. Your guidelines may specify TNR, but that’s their standard.
For some editors, it’s a lot easier to spot typoes and punctuation errors with a non-proportional font. Others find Courier too boring.
Not quite a one-size-fits-all world, says the huge fat man… (grin)
Dr. Phil
I actually started going into what I meant by “standard” but then I deleted it. As a slusher I’m not going to balk at any “normal” looking font but here’s what I encountered that isn’t standard by any definition:
* 8-point font
* some crazy, semi-cursive script
* a three-inch margin at the top of every page
* A11-sized paper
Not standard. No way, no how. And remember, these came from a sampling of only ten stories.
At least you’re not running a business…the trend here in the Atlanta metro is for cities to tear up the sidewalks in neighborhood commercial districts for “pedestrian improvements,” and in the year (or 2 or 3) or so it takes many of the small businesses in that section close. That way the few pedestrians afterward won’t be encumbered by shoppers going into and out of shops and restaurants!
What do you mean by A11 paper? Are you referring to A4 paper? That’s an international standard. Just because we use 8-1/2 x 11 doesn’t mean the metric world is forced to.
Dr. Phil
You know, that happens here too. There’s a big “save the local business” push here in Madison (as well there should be) but I can think of two places where they absolutely destroyed the walk-up ability and parking near small businesses, virtually guaranteeing to push shoppers to the big box stores on the far sides of town where they have miles of open asphalt to park.
Oops, yes I meant A4. And I realize it’s the international standard. I’m not asking the world to change their paper over, but this submission transgressed and kept transgressing:
* No SASE because there were no US stamps handy, but an envelope with a PostIt telling me as much
* A fancy font
* Multiple stories in a single submission
* Very strange page formatting, including starting the story in the bottom quarter of the first page and having enormous (2 inch?) margins
Point being Phil, these are all distractions that made me not focus on the story (or stories, rather) at hand. I’ve heard it said a million times that the reason standard MS format exists is to make it easy on the slusher. This is true.
A4 paper wasn’t a big deal but the font and margins were distracting to say the least. The cover letter included an email that I ended up using to send a response.
I’m not trying to be a dick. But it was late and wanted to go through the submissions quickly, not wonder “now what the hell is the story with this one?” If the writer would have used A4 paper, with TNR or Courier, with normal margins, only sent a single story, and put a note in her cover letter that she would appreciate an email since she’s living abroad, it wouldn’t have been that big of a deal.
But it was midnight, I was tired, I’d been doing research all night, none of the six submissions before hers were standardized either… you get the point. Every writer probably thinks “Well, if I was an editor…” but the fact is time is short for everyone. Reading through these submissions is time I could spend writing, or studying, or whatever. Standardizing the submission makes slushing easy. Anything not standard makes it not as easy. Is it a big deal? No, but it creates more work for tired eyes, especially when no two submissions are in the same format.