(no subject)

[ivyfic]

Today I crushed a dozen people's hopes.

Yay, slush pile.

Comments

[edgehopper.livejournal.com]

Remember, their hopes deserved to be crushed :)

[sydni-64.livejournal.com]

aww. Think of it the way P. Adams Sitney does. You're just helping them to realize that their talent lies somewhere else.

[sydni-64.livejournal.com]

(because it sure as hell doesn't lie in that piece-of-crap manuscript)

[chuckro.livejournal.com]

That's a lot of hopes to crush. I hope you didn't claw out your eyes halfway through.

Is this part of your new job, or are you still reading slush for other companies?

[ecmyers.livejournal.com]

"There never was much hope. Just a fool's hope."

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

I feel like writing to all these people - please, please get an agent. Because some of it's not half bad, but something would have to be un-fucking-believable - like, Shakespeare and Kerouac and Fitzgerald and Pratchett all rolled together only better, and it would have to be all that in the first page - to get published from the slush pile.

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

Oh, this is for the job. At least they're only partial manuscripts. Honestly, for most of them I read the cover letter, maybe a paragraph of the synopsis and a few lines of the manuscript. And if they don't get me with that, tough. Deeply unfair, yes, but I have a hundred of these things sitting on my desk right now.

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

There are only a couple of those. Most aren't half bad, though some people need to be reacquainted with the concept of the Mary Sue.

Quotes from one cover letter:
"A completed novel...is fabricated in literary style..."
"This tale is fictive but inspired by a veritable time in my life."
"The dichotomoy of cadres dissolves throughout the tome as the characters interact and events unfurl to become the cause of a great and terrible ruse."
"[The hero] cannot actualize his aim..."
"Samples and entire existential manuscripts...are available for your review."

All from one letter - the first I looked at, in fact. Somebody buy this guy a dictionary because he obviously doesn't know what he's doing with his thesaurus.