Who Am I? Slush Pile Observations

It's always fun reading story submissions. We were lucky enough to receive almost 250 submissions from writers all around the world, which added up to around 215 valid submissions to read. 

What's most interesting about any submissions period for us is taking a small step back and having a look at the stories in a broader sense to see what patterns emerged, and getting a feel for what it is that writers are being drawn to and/or like to explore in their work. This post is a write-up of some general observations about the stories we received, mostly because it's interesting, partly because it could teach us something, and a tiny bit because it's cool as hell to write a blog post.

"The ocean is a lesbian" — Julia Armfield

This quote is apt because many of our submissions were watery. Water-themed, water-dwelling, water-coloured, water-logged, water-inspired (salt, sea, rivers, lakes, creatures from the depths, squid, octopuses)—you name it, we got it! This made up (no joke) over forty percent of submissions. As a friend pointed out, we literally have a watery monster/nymph as our namesake, so we deserved that.

It turns out though that queer writers, on average, like to write about the sea. We saw women walking into the sea and out of the sea, we saw the ocean used as metaphor and motif, as the depths of one's soul and the darkness of one's past. It's a versatile element, as evidenced by the many stories in our submissions that featured it in one way or another!

Out of all these stories, we were limited to picking a certain number, and the ones we have are bangers.

Women (and stories) Be Weird

I love a weird story. The weirder, the better. And as it turns out, plenty of writers love 'em too, and were ready to sling 'em into our submissions box. It's always fun when a woman is more than she seems, when her canines are perhaps fangs and her thirst is more for blood than for Dr Pepper, isn't it?

A small few stories took it a leap further and made the whole narrative just plain weird—in the best ways, of course! When we pushed back on one and complained about a lack of speculative, the writer very ably reminded us that weird is in itself speculative, and of course we had to agree. One way to stand out is to come up with something nobody has ever thought of before, that's for sure. Our book would not be the same if not for the weird we received.

No Drive; Only Vibes

A lot of the subs relied heavily on mood and vibes alone as opposed to having any real conflict or narrative drive. This left me feeling a little lost as a reader—I always try to meet a story (or indeed any creative piece) where it's at, but a story that lacks any push, drive, or hook to pull me through is one I tend to struggle with. This isn't to say every story needs a big flashy concept or action-heavy capital P 'Plot'. My writing friends will all attest that I am not a "plotty person", so I'll be the first person to defend mood pieces.

All I need is something to make me care about the narrative and the characters in it, and sometimes I struggled to find it. I think this observation is a good place to ask ourselves (including myself!) if we've truly done the hard work of empathy-building, or if not that, then piquing the reader's curiosity enough to hook and reel them all the way through the story. What bait have you set throughout the narrative that is almost certain to lure at least one unsuspecting slush reader in?

And They Did Not Live Happily Ever After

When it comes to identity and purpose, two important facets of being human, many authors were drawn to narratives that end in discomfort, turmoil, and other complicated emotions. When we first opened submissions, I was curious to see which way things would go. From previous reader experience I've seen slush piles from marginalised writers lean majority happy (knowing we rarely get happy endings), and I've seen them lean toward complicated (knowing we're also often denied complexity). We got a lot of angry! And revenge! And sad. But a few happy too. Our writers gave us a lot to think about, especially when it came to creating balance in an anthology of collected short fiction.

We're eager to see what direction the slush leans in during submissions calls for future anthologies with different themes!

Theme? What Theme?

We get it. You’ve worked hard on a piece and you really wish it could find a home. You put it out there, kiss it goodbye, and hope for the best. Unfortunately with thematic subs calls it’s actually really important to grapple with themes, and we had to say goodbye both immediately and in the dying stages of selection to so many stories we loved because this was not the right book for that piece.

Starting in the wrong place

In short stories I think we can all agree that every word counts, right? The read can’t feel shortchanged on worldbuilding even though this is a short work, and you’ve got no room to spare. Often, the best place to find extraneous words is at the beginning. In many of our editing comments was this phrase— “The story actually starts here”. This could be a few paragraphs in, and sometimes it was a few pages in! We found that folks wanted to do a lot more upfront than was required. The ones that really resonated dropped us right into the middle of the action, no questions asked.

No Dragons?

Do Sapphics not like dragons as much? Two stories submitted that anything at all to do with a dragon. Huh. Colour me shocked.

Reading the stories submitted during this call has been so much fun, and has also been a massive privilege. Now we continue the hard work finishing the book... which you'll be the first to hear about if you're subscribed to our newsletter!