I am Slush

Agents and editors find me in their mailboxes and inboxes. I am raw, uncensored, somehow rough and incomplete. Yet they do not throw me away, instead they throw me on the pile. The slush pile.

 

Now and then, when the moon is full and no pressing engagements cry out for their attention, they crawl down to the basement, noses plugged against the terrible stink of amateurism and desperation. Bravely, yet with a shiver of hope, they shovel the pile into a blast furnace and set the charge to burn. Their fiery scrutiny heats the slush, melting it, allowing the pure and well-told stories to separate from the crazies and the borings and the poorly writtens, which clump into a vulgar mass and float to the top.

With glittering pens of doom, they skim the scum off the surface returning it whence it came with form rejections, one after another, after another. Sweating through the chill hours of the night, these intrepid souls burn down the slush until they can tap the vent, releasing the molten treasures that remain, and pouring them into the soot-black crucible of 'I would like to see more.'

I am then thrown into a hotter furnace, stoked with purer submissions and perhaps a cappuccino or three, heated to a white-hot frenzy of anticipation, and if lucky, I shall be poured pure and new from this crucible into the mold of an emerging voice, a shiny, newly minted author ready for the world to see.

Artwork:
Queen of the Coal Pile by Aaron Muderick http://www.flickr.com/photos/amuderick/264663075/
'Whole Gold Bar on Wood' www.flickr.com/photos/39051216@N07/3592551910