How they met themselves, by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. One of the joys of the internet is the fact I can be in two places at once.
Hopefully not so much in the creepy way displayed in the painting there.
For a few months now, on this blog I've been trying a rotation of theme days. Miscellaneous Monday, Well Written Wednesday, and Sci-Fi Friday. I fail about as often as I succeed. Ask any newspaper columnist ever about how not-simple repetitive content is.
But this week my themes line up, between this blog and The Art of Procrastination, so I'm cross posting. They will be as ships that pass in the night. Seriously, stop looking for ice-bergs, it'll be fine.
Yes, alright. I'm being lazy and trying to write four blog posts this week instead of five. So what? Were you--amorphous internet people you--going to offer to write one of those for me?
Didn't think so.
Anyway, it's Wednesday and that means we talk about things that are well-written. Or not, as the case may be.
There's been a sudden increase of slush pile in my life lately. And I know what writers think and say about the dreaded Slush. Let me tell you about the Slush from the other side.
Golden Fleece Press isn't by any means my first experience with a slush-pile. I've had plenty of occasion in my life to read things that should never have seen the light of day. I once reviewed a romance novel that has forever become my yard-stick for fail on a level I can barely articulate. It was long, and awful, and shaped about eighty percent of my views on the usefulness of historical accuracy in entertainment.
There was another one that involved badly conceived time-travel and characters even biblical-level plague would have been too good an end for.
I once rather stupidly, in the annals of my life squiring writers, offered online assistance to literally anyone who wanted help with their novel plot. What followed was three hours of incomprehensible, werewolf-themed shenanigans I will never get back and I feel their absence keenly.
These are the worst cases. The hyperbole--great spaghetti monster in the sky do I wish it was--infused funnies. The truly bad. But we all have ideas that die on the vine, or that should die on the vine. Apparently there's a knack for learning which ones those are. I can sympathize with that, even if I'm doing it backwards and sideways over my rolled eyes because just why.
What I can't get, I refuse to get, are the misplaced submissions. Why would you relegate yourself to the slush needlessly? And also we said it was a journal for children. Have you met children? They're the little things we used to be before life taught us there were worse things than spinach and math homework. We wanted Bunnicula, not Pet Cemetery.
Alright. Rant over. Maybe later I'll spill into all the ways YA is the deadest vibrant market I've ever beheld.
Fingers crossed next week's round of slush will be from people who once held an affinity for celery-desiccating bunnies.
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