For those of you who missed this exchange in the comments on “A Note To Writers”:

JON HANSEN: You’re just letting the subs pile up? How come?

Delayed due to the illness, or have you already lost the thrill of slushdiving?

ME: Couple of reasons. Since Susan and I are collaborating at long distance, reading the MSS as they come in would involve a lot of photocopying and extra mail costs, whereas if we wait till the end of the submission period I can just take a few days off, fill the trunk up with envelopes and drive down to California. Plus, it’s just easier to spend a couple of days going through the whole stack than to spend a few hours on it every week.

But in general, as an editor, I think it’ll be better to wait till all the stories are in and then judge them on an equal footing. And as a writer, I want to discourage rejectomancy — particularly of the “I haven’t heard anything, but Bob’s already got a rejection notice — they must like my story!” variety.

It’d be different if I was running a magazine — then it’d be rolling acceptances and rejections, and worry about fitting the acceptances into the publication schedule later.

(Still, at some point soon I’ll have to start at least opening envelopes and noting down names and titles and word counts, or the bookkeeping is going to get out of hand. At which point I’ll start posting slush reports like I did for ASZAS.)

Anyhow, if you haven’t submitted yet, do not despair. You’ve still got more than six weeks.

And I’d like to again point out that — so long as it’s epic — we will happily consider, in any genre or no genre, plays, poetry, sheet music (with accompanying audio), scripts, storyboards, box scores (with accompanying commentary) architectural drawings, recipes, assembly instructions, creative nonfiction, and anything else that stands a fair chance of reproducing well in black-and-white at 300dpi on cheap paper.