I’ve just experienced one of the more unexpected and unusual effects of hanging out with one of the largest speculative fiction publishers in The Netherlands. I guess it’s also an effect of the whole Writers of the Future thing: being taken seriously by a publisher.

Being a large specfic publisher in Holland means he’s got an editor on his payroll instead of having to do all the work by himself. Even so, it’s a lot of unpleasant work to go through the piles of unsolicited manuscripts he receives. So tonight, we sat in the garden behind the gorgeous mansion where M Publishers occupies the back half of the basement, and went through two dozen home-made novels together.

It would be cruel to quote any here. Suffice it to say that the horror stories about slush piles I’ve heard from friends in the business and at two successive Writers of the Future workshops are all true. There were manuscripts that would have been innovative in the seventies; apostrophied alien names; bad grammar, spelling and punctuation; a novel whose fantasy world – with a road through the ‘Forest of Fate’ leading to ‘Dwarrowdelf’, where the protagonist would find a sword named ‘Excalibur’ – was the least of its cliches. There were two heart-wrenching stories by deeply unhappy sixteen-year-old girls teased mercilessly in high school, sharing with us their separate fantasies about a girl being teased mercilessly in high school only to find out she’s the heiress to a secret magical empire. There was a badly written, directionless, incomprehensible book by four boys, whose cruel teacher had encouraged them to send it in.

It made me so sad to read these fruits of months of work, and see the effort and enthusiasm the authors had poured into their stories, and still have to conclude that they would all have to be rejected. None were good; most were terrible.

And one of the hopeful authors had even managed to missspell, in huge letters in blue marker on the envelope, the word ‘MANUSSCRIPT‘.