Teresa Nielsen Hayden on slush reading, rejection letters, and associated subjects:

If you’re an author, the arrival of a rejection letter is a major event. If you’re an editor (or an associate editor, assistant editor, editorial assistant, or intern), 90% of all rejections are something you do on a quiet afternoon when you don’t have something more urgent breathing down your neck. O Yawn, you say, O Stretch, there’s that catalogue copy finished. I’ve got — hmmm, about two and a half hours left in the day. Nothing else urgent? Okay, it’s time to blight some hopes and crush some dreams. . . .

Most days, the slush will divide up into books you reject immediately, and books you feel guilty about rejecting immediately, so you read further in them, and perhaps assign them to an intern to read, and then you reject them. . . . What RejectionCollection.com sees as someone getting bent out of shape . . . or snootiness . . . is the bored irritation of someone who’s processing a very large stack of rejections, and is having to deal with a submission that has ignored one of the most basic requirements in the guidelines.

Like most of Teresa’s writing, there’s much more good stuff than I feel like I can adequately quote, so go read the whole thing.