Notes from the Slush

Well, we’re a little over halfway through the open reading period for Fungi, the anthology that I’m co-editing with Silvia Moreno-Garcia. If you’ve still got fungus stories to send in, you’ve got until February 15th to get them to us. (See the guidelines here.)

In the meantime, I’m going to talk a bit about what we’ve already seen in the slush so far, and what we’d like to see more of. Silvia already posted her take here, and I don’t know that I have a ton to add, but I’m going to post anyway, because I’m editing an anthology, dammit, and I’m very professional!

This is my first time reading for an anthology, and so I wasn’t really sure what to expect, and I don’t know how what we’ve gotten stacks up against other anthologies, or slush piles for magazines, or what-have-you. A couple of things I can say is: Please, please, please put your word count in your cover letter? And put your cover letter in the body of your email? I don’t know how other people feel about this, but those two things make life a lot easier on me, anyway.

I’d also like to second and reinforce Silvia’s mention that we’ve been getting way too many then-I-turned-into-a-mushroom-the-end stories. I like mushroom people as much as the next guy (more, obviously), but at this point there definitely needs to be something more going on in the story if we’re going to take it. I’ll also agree that I would love to see a mushroom noir, if anyone’s got it in them.

Anyway, I think it’s shaping up to be a really exciting anthology so far, and I’m looking forward to seeing what we get in the remaining days!