“I’m sorry,” Barb said, smiling at him quizzically. “We haven’t been introduced.”
“I’m Larry Winston,” the man said, sticking out his hand. “I publish Zero Option, Dark Desires and A Bit of Mind.”
“Oh,” Barbara said, smiling and nodding. “I like your jacket.”
“Thanks,” the man said, frowning.
“I’m Angie,” the woman said, shaking Barb’s hand as well. “I’m sort of a gopher for the magazines.”
“Ah,” Barbara said, nodding. “I’m sorry I haven’t actually read any of them.”
“That’s okay,” the man said. “What are you at the con for?”
“I’m a reader of K. Goldberg,” Barb said.
“Oh, we’ve published Kay,” Angie said, happily. “She does wonderful dark fantasy.”
“That I can believe,” Barbara said with unintended humor.
“Why don’t you come down to the room?” Larry said, gesturing down the corridor. “We’re having a slush party.”
“What’s a slush party?” Barb said, uneasily.
“First con?” Angie asked, waving the way.
“Yes?” Barbara replied. It was unlikely that she was being lured away to be axed, but she also wasn’t used to being invited to a hotel room except by drunken businessmen who ignored her ring.
“Slush is the stories that are submitted to the magazine,” Larry said. “It just… piles up. There’s no way to stay ahead of it. So from time to time we bring it all to a con and invite people in to read it. That gets ninety percent, at least, thrown out. Then we can concentrate on the rest.”
“That seems a bit… brutal,” Barb said as she got to a half open door and followed Angie in. “I mean, people work hard on those stories. You just let anyone… toss them out?”
“Wait until you read some of them,” Angie said, laughing. “Larry has a favorite he reads every con, just to give an idea how bad they can get.”
There were about nine people in the room, sprawled on the beds, the floor and most of the chairs. Where there weren’t people there was paper or boxes of paper. There were at least ten file boxes stacked up against the wall, every single one of them overflowing with envelopes.
“Every submission’s supposed to have a self-addressed stamped envelope in it,” Angie said, picking one of the envelopes out of a box at random. She slit it open with a curved opener and pulled out the folded pages within. Sure enough, there was an envelope included with the sheets of paper.
“Incredible,” Angie said, grinning. “We only get about one in three that has an SASE. If there’s no SASE, be pretty sure it’s going to get thrown. We can’t keep track otherwise.”
She sat down on a partially clear area and opened up the tri-folded pages, then grimaced.
“Look,” she said, handing over the pages.
Barbara slid to the floor by Angie’s spot and started reading.
“ ‘When Gunor reached the feiry wastes of Thogrun he thought that his journey was at an end. But it had hardly beginning. Acrros the feiry wastes he strode, his acks Gomail on his brawny shoulder…’ ”
Barb struggled through the tedious prose, wondering when Gunor was going to do anything of note or, dare she hope, the writer would learn to run a basic spell-checker. After two pages, Angie looked over at her.
“You’re still reading that?” Angie asked.
“It seemed the thing to do,” Barbara said, trying very hard not to laugh at the prose. And she was still trying to find a plot in all the killing orcs and crossing feiry, sic, wastes.
“Good God, you’ve got a stronger stomach than I do,” Angie said, pulling the papers out of her hand. “Did it get any better?”
“Worse,” Barb admitted.
Angie picked up a form, filled in a line and then tossed the sheets of paper into a box filled with similar sheets.
“This is the rejection form,” Angie said, showing it to her. It had a standard “We’re very sorry your story, insert name here, does not meet our needs at this time,” message. Angie had already scrawled, somewhat illegibly, “The Journeys of Gunor the Great” in the space provided, which was too small so “the Great” was cramped into the space.
“Stuff it in the envelope,” Angie said, fitting action to words. “Lick and toss into the out box,” she said, sending the envelope skimming across the room into a box with “Kill Them All! Kill! Kill!” scrawled on it in Magic Marker. “Another tiny literary ego crushed by the evil publishing industry.”
“It does seem a bit heartless,” Barbara said, shaking her head.
“Do you see all that?” Angie asked, gesturing at the boxes. “That’s the inflow of just the last three months. And that’s just what we haven’t already read. Wait until you get to a really bad one.”
“That wasn’t really bad?” Barb asked, her eyes wide.
“Anybody got a really bad one?” Angie asked, raising her voice.
“I’ve got the pig story,” Larry called from the other side of the room, without looking up from the story he was reading.
“Not the pig story,” Angie said. “That’s in a category all its own.”
“Try this one,” a dark-haired man said, flipping some papers at her through the air. Half of them drifted off to fall on the floor as he flipped another envelope expertly through the air to hit the Kill box on the side.
Angie managed to snag the top page and grimaced.
“Look,” she said, handing the page to Barbara.
The page was lined paper filled with crabbed, nearly illegible, writing. There were numerous line-outs and scratch outs with words crammed in and over the sentences in no apparent order. And despite this careful editing, more than half the words were misspelled. The word “word” was misspelled, twice. From what she could glean of the actual story… there wasn’t one.
“Okay, that’s bad,” Barb said. “People actually think this stuff will get published?”
“Yep,” Angie said, tossing the paper on the floor to join the drifts. “And sometimes you’ll run into them at cons and they’ll ask you why they didn’t get published. Of course, as you can see, there’s no way to keep up with who they were. But they always have a bad photocopy of their original story. And you have to explain that it first has to be legible, then it has to be literate and last but most certainly most important it has to actually be a good story. Excellent prose, interesting characters, a theme that causes people to think.”
“Wouldn’t a plot be nice?” Barbara asked, smiling.
“Plot is sort of optional,” Angie said, frowning. “Some of the finest pieces of writing in the world don’t have what would conventionally be called a plot. Theater of the absurd for an example.”
“And a hook,” Larry said from across the room. He tossed the papers he was reading on the floor and picked up another from a pile. “It needs a good hook.”
“What’s a hook?” Barb asked.
“Think of it as a topic sentence,” Angie said. “A beginning sentence, or even phrase, that makes the reader want to know what it means.”
“ ‘Before the lobster blew up we were having such a good time,’ “ Larry said, still not looking up.
“ ‘I didn’t like being a leaf, but it was better than the alternatives,’ “ the dark-haired man belly-down on the bed added.
“ ‘It seemed that defenestration was the only solution to Ermintrude,’ “ one of the girls on the floor said. She was a college-aged Asian-American twisted up in a complex position that at first looked like yoga. Then Barbara remembered her own college years and recognized it as College-Study-Position Fourteen. “That’s a classic, of course.”