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SLUSH

                                   April 6, 2008

Editors call the pile of
unsolicited manuscripts
"the slushpile", and           I mean real editors,
you don't have to talk to      the ones that read the
many of them to realize        slushpile themselves,
that there are good            as opposed to
reasons for this.              dilettantes that
                               employ "first readers"...
Much of what comes in          or the ones that just
"over the transom"             buy from cocktail party
is unmitigated, quasi-         friends (ala _The New
literate junk.                 Yorker_).

    There's an interesting
    phenomena of everyone
    getting the same idea
    at once and writing the
    same story.

    In science fiction, once
    it was "Adam and Eve in
    the radioactive gardens            In the world of detective
    of Cleveland" (as Joanna           stories, it was not "the
    Russ put it), and in the           butler did it" but "the
    late sixties there were            murderer is-- the detective
    these "arty" pieces about          himself!"
    astronauts escaping
    capsules morphing into                That was circa
    babies being born, then               1920, I think.
    in the 80s it was "What
    if the video game is
    really real?"

    I have no idea what we're
    up to now.  Maybe it's
    "The President is really
    an evil space alien."


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