Julie R. Neidlinger: Lone Prairie Art and Writing

Reading the raw slush pile.

written by Julie R. Neidlinger 0 comments link this post

I know my blog posts -- all of my blogs, nearly all of my posts -- suck rocks.

As I read an interesting (albeit three-year-old) post about writing scams, my enjoyment of feeling like I was "in" on the joke shifted very suddenly when I read this:

"Thanks to the Power of the Internet and the Miracle of Print-on-Demand publishing, everyone can read raw slush!"

Ye gads.

It's horrible, it's true. Slush! Everywhere!

Some people have confessed to being a slush pile reader, and some people have reacted to it. Some have discussed the how rodents live and survive in the slush pile. Some have written in praise and support for the glorious slush that abounds.

I just slush onwards.

Not mush, but slush. My words slurp and slide, lacking bite and cacophony, very slushy in sound, sentences run-on and maybe too many really big and really nice weak adjectives with a few-to-many quickly filling ashamedly used adverbs telling and not showing the story.

Only the good writers make it to McSweeney's! If only I could creatively write about "Possible First Names for Count Chocula" instead of taking myself too seriously and trying to write a SciFi/Fantasy novel* of invented languages which combines Tolkein with Koontz in a unique and unusual way in which characters names are guttural and only pronounceable by the non-thick-tongued person who doesn't mind weird vowel and consonant interchanges sprinkled with unusual punctuation with all illustrations and cover art done in either the bodice-ripper-meets-Highlander or featureless-accented-featured-anime.

I'd start a slush pile blog to dump all my slush into in the hopes of keeping it quarantined there, but there already exists a slush pile blog.

incidentally, this post should be in the slush pile because I only wrote it out of love for the funny sounding word "slush."