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The envelopes and emails rolled in, and I rolled them out with the standard knockback letter. It stopped being funny; it felt arduous. I hated that it was my job to shatter people's dreams of being published, but I also hated that so many of them had such illiterate dreams. The physical act of writing a book may not be difficult, but there's a big difference between smacking away at a keyboard and writing something that anyone who doesn't really love you wants to read. The majority of people who submitted their work went wrong after the first few pages at best, if the cover letter wasn't dreadful.
From "The shocking truth about the slush pile" by Jean Hannah Edelstein at the Guardian Blogs. Read the whole thing at http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/05/the_shocking_truth_about_the_s.html (and don't forget to read through the huge number of comments from both sides of the fence).
Caferati link...
I read the entire post and the comments with a good amount of chuckling. The divide between the publishing world view and those on the wrong side of the slush pile - who serves whom ? - never really gets smaller with all the discussions.
I started to read the blog of one Miss Snark, agent extraordinaire in 2005. I was reading it purely for her snarkisms, but she is both funny and informative, and discovered a whole new vocabulary starting from SASE and slush pile that I had no idea even existed :-)
She stopped writing recently, but the blog archives still exist at http://misssnark.blogspot.com
Aparna
