Today’s confessions come from the slush pile wisdom of Nancy DiMauro, FFO staffer and slush queen. If you write, and submit those stories, you dread the slush pile. It’s an inevitable part of the process. The way you get out of the slush and into print is to impress someone like me. Someone who has volunteered […]
So you want to be a writer. That’s fantastic. Â I love writers. Writers are some of my favorite people. Â They’re brilliant and quirky and often tend to daydream (which is why they tend to thrive in their own internal worlds). You have the passion. Â You even have a manuscript you know will revolutionize the world. […]
I’ve been reading a lot of slush this past month. Â Mountains of it, really. Â So much slush that I have imprints of the little yes/no/maybe buttons burned indelibly into the inside of my eyelids so I can see them staring back at me even in my sleep. That’s a whole lot of slush. But the […]
Author and blogger Jim Harrington has been asking editors and slush pile readers to “list, in excruciating details, all that each desires in his/her stories.” Good idea. He poses this request in the form of six question and–not unreasonably–gathers his continuing responses at the Six Question For… blog. Jim has posted a response from FFO […]
This isn’t a rant, but a serious question: why wouldn’t you name your main character within the first sentence or so? So many stories (especially short-short stories) have only “he” or “she” as the main character; some will start with the pronoun and then give the name later. But a name is so powerful! Consider […]
An amusing bit by William Meikle on sffworld.com. đ
I’m pretty good-natured, so none of the following have stopped me from reading your stories, but consider what an editor might think on reading the following statements in the email that accompanies your submission: “I wrote this in 20 minutes after finding out about your zine.” While I appreciate the fact that you want to […]
Many authors write stories with twists. For a while, Law and Order even advertised the fact that there was a twist at the end of their episodes. The problem with twist endings and flash is that they often don’t feel like twists: they feel like punch lines. And that makes the stories jokes, not stories. […]
I just stumbled across a year-old post by Steve Goble called “Swords and Flashery“. It hits on a topic I’ve been thinking about as I go through the submissions we’ve received over the last two months. [After writing the first draft of a fantasy flash,] I read the [2000-word] piece and found nary an ounce […]
…not that I’m intimating that they’re closely related or anything. đ This post is for writers rather than readers. Over the past six weeks we’ve received about 300 submissions. Thanks to everyone who has given us a try, and I’d like to offer my encouragement even to those whose stories I’ve rejected. It looks like […]