I am writing to you because God has given me a gift of writing and I will make lots of sales for your company. This writing is a gift from God. I specialize in dramatic writing that will win you awards... (etc etc)(Enclosed were xeroxed pages from the middle of Tuck Everlasting.)
Saturday, July 19, 2008
Slush and Punishment: God Has a Restraining Order Against You
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15 comments:
Okay, why haven't I thought of that? Oh yeah, because I have at least half a brain. (On a good day.)
(I am laughing my ass off right now...)
Hey, God gave us photocopiers for a reason! They're the perfect remedy for those times when the muse is not speaking or otherwise engaged...
Eh?
I LOVE that story. Won't you publish it?
LOL, this is too funny!!
:-)
The horrible thing is that it's often very hard to tell whether these people think they're putting one over on us, or if somehow they're nuts enough to think they ARE the author or illustrator of the attached plagiarism.
Some of those hand-written letters are very, very sincere sounding.
Well, I thought I couldn't be surprised by anything, but this one takes the cake. Thanks for brightening our day.
Well, that IS a good book. Though wouldn't Chronicles of Narnia be more appropriate?
clare-dragonfly said...
"Well, that IS a good book. Though wouldn't Chronicles of Narnia be more appropriate?"
Nah -- Chronicles has a witch in it -- and you know that makes the book evil.
(which was the reasoning of the church group who tried to ban the Chronicles of Narnia from libraries in Maryland some years back.)
"The horrible thing is that it's often very hard to tell whether these people think they're putting one over on us, or if somehow they're nuts enough to think they ARE the author or illustrator of the attached plagiarism."
Stephen King told a story once in an interview about coming home and finding that a man had broken into his house. The man apparently thought he had written all of Stephen King's books and Mr. King had stolen them and published... The man was obviously mentally ill, but he also had a shoebox in which he'd made a home made bomb... it was actually rubber erasers with paperclips stuck in them... now that's frightening.
At least mental illness (in that case) made him not only bad at writing, but also bomb-making. Crossing my fingers...
As bad as these are, (and I am reticent to believe they aren't at least exaggerated for effect), they must give you and your editor friends something to laugh about (cry about?) at the end of the day...
While these examples are "inspired by" real slush, I try hard for verisimilitude.
Truthfully, I don't need to exaggerate, and if I did exaggerate it would make the lesson part of this exercise meaningless. Parts of the slush are quite literally this bad.
But I don't blame you for finding it hard to believe. It was a hell of a shock for me too when I first started reading slush.
This is one of those stories that really makes me wish for a Slush Museum. There should be one. Hey, I'd pay good money for the laughs, never mind the 'learning experience'.
Poor God, he is blamed for everything:)
Having never actually seen a real slush pile, I can only guess, but I think webook.com would qualify as a Slush Museum. Some of the writing there makes my head hurt. There are gems, but oh, do you have to search.
I've noticed a direct correlation between quality of writing and willingness to be critiqued by peers.
I say many thanks to the father of the website admin I read this, because at this website I know a lot of information information that I did not know before his
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