...what reading slush for months on end does to your mind, then just read this.
It is a bloody brilliant blog and I wish I'd written it.
(I wish I'd discovered the blog, too, but have to admit that Janet Reid got to it first. Now I know what her competitors feel like.)
6 comments:
That widower with the paranormal doorstop is still submitting? He must've had a nice letter from every single rejector in the English speaking world by now. For the love of all that is good, tell me there can't be more than one of them!
I bet he's had a few nasty ones as well.
I'd love to arrange a slush-day for a few blog followers, and get them to report on the deep boredom and cringing embarrassment that it involves. I don't think anyone realises just how awful it is until they've done it, and even then it's hard to explain. I shall investigate.
Please do not start investigating until you have checked the emergency chocolate supply!
Yes, Nathan at Curtis Brown gave us all the opportunity to play "Agent for a Day" a while back. He gave us 50 queries at random intervals throughout the day. But I think he'd pre-filtered them so we only saw the reasonably sane ones.
It's like a love affair. You start by being intrigued by the idea. Then you can't think about anything but your plot, you find more and more thrilling details in your characters, you can't wait to place them in new situations. Then you get used to them, get a little tired of some aspects of their characters, wish you could change them but can't because the story wouldn't work if you did. You decide to carry on and it feels OK. You’re happy with the first draft. You re-read. The plot looks dodgy. You go back over it, edit, re-edit. You tell yourself it’s good, you’ve spent a year writing it after all. But slowly you start to dislike the whole story. Before you really hate it, it's accepted by a publisher and when you're completely over it, you start doing the PR. While having already fallen in love with another plot and set of characters.
Or go to Twitter and search for #GUDslush :D.
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