In Process

Thirty-eight days ago, I submitted a short story called People Need to Know to Everyday Fiction (EDF). I don't count the days - the submission tracking system tells me. Up until yesterday, that same system told me that the status of my story submission was "Slush". You don't need to know a lot about the publishing world to understand that slush is not a good place to be. In publishing houses, the "slush pile" is the nickname for the great big pile of unsolicited manuscripts that are yet to be sorted (read: thrown away). The name comes from the quality of the vast majority of manuscipts in the slush pile. They're not typically very good. Anyway, the name has stuck, and the editorial team at EDF have a slush pile too, albeit electronic.

Like many publishers, EDF have "slush readers". Their job is to read through the slush pile, reject all the very bad stories immediately, and pass the not-so-very-bad stories on to the editors for them to read. When a submission passes the first-pass filter of the slush reader and moves to an editor, the submission status moves from "Slush" to "In Process".

This is what happened to me yesterday. People Need to Know got past the gatekeeper, and an editor is going to read it. The reason I'm posting about this? Well, I'm really quite happy about this little piece of progress. Too happy, for what it is, I think. That said, some slush reader didn't think it was bad enough to reject outright. That's something, isn't it?

If you want to know more about submitting stories to EDF, have a read of an article I wrote about that called Get Published at Everyday Fiction.

If you want to poke fun, use the comments. Happy New Year!