QUILLBLOG

It came from the slush pile

In this essay (which also appeared in Paste magazine), blogger Nick Zaino chronicles his days working for a “book doctoring” company in Buffalo – “editing and critiquing the work of hopeful authors with money to burn, a word processor, and delusions of mediocrity.”

Mostly he talks about the frighteningly bad work that he had to read. To be sure, describing the monstrosities that lurk and thrash in a typical slush pile is a pretty reliable source of cheap laughs. But Zaino’s piece is also unusually well written, and is worth highlighting for this bit alone:

I spent my days trying to meet my 600 pages a week plus one critique quota, reading the mostly hopeful drivel of people who believed the old adage that everyone has a book in them. Everyone also has an appendix in them, but most people are kind enough not to remove it and scare others by dangling it in front of them.

And because we like cheap laughs here at Quillblog…. One of my own fond slush pile memories involved a cover letter saying something along the lines of, “If you want to read a story unlike anything you’ve ever read before, turn the page.” Well, that got me intrigued. So I turned the page, only to read, “Stan is a cynical cop two weeks from retirement. Joe is his brash young partner….”

(Thanks to Friend of Q&Q Frank for the link.)

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