It’s been a month and a half since I last looked at the slushpile (I know, less frequently than I promise in the guidelines), but all the correspondence and all the submissions have been properly attended.
Right now this issue is running an acceptance rate of 1 for every 70 submissions. I anticipate that number falling significantly, because there are several promising stories awaiting the scrutiny of the other editors.
Plus I’m advocating getting more content than usual. At the moment we have four cases of legal paper in my closet at home, and I’ve just ordered some immensely cheap toner for our beloved copier Sanjay2. I feel that warrants adding another couple pages to our skanky zine.
In this last pile of slush there were only a couple of stories that involved abduction of rednecks, down from the usual rate.
I also noticed that when a story bored me in the first couple of paragraphs (SPACE SQUID is a publication that must never publish anything boring) and I skipped to the end, there was invariably a climactic sentence that used the word "matter". As in "and nothing else mattered" or "and that was all that mattered." I noticed that happened about eight times this evening.
SPACE SQUID prefers climactic sentences with much more specificity.
Now would be a great time to submit to the squid. I’ll probably be bored through the end of the year, with nothing better to do than read.
