"While I think that Paul [Riddell] is purposely enhancing the hyperbole for dramatic effect, nonetheless I suspect he perceives very clearly that in the case of Art, too many cooks overcrowd the kitchen till the Health Department condemns it. That is to say—for instance—when you have only three or four authors who can claim ‘Hugo Winning Novel’ on the cover of a book, you’ve got a rara avis, something special that will capture attention, that will set it apart. But when we have forty-five years of Hugo winners, and thirty-two years of Nebula laureates, well, it does tend to water down the gene pool insofar as whoopee rhapsodic unusualness is concerned.

"When every third paperback—not only trumpets the blurb encomium of some author only slightly better-known than the person who wrote the book itself—impertinently declares itself a HUGO NOMINATED or HUGO CONSIDERED or HUGO NOTED or HUGO WINKED AT book, well, to be kind, the cachet has long since been tarnished beyond even the aid of Brasso. Common sense, which seems to be a commodity in short supply among amateurs who reside more in the Land of Urban Fantasy than they do in the realm of pragmatic business career, ought to tell writers and their editors and even the nameless drudges who write cover blurbs for Tor and Berkley and Roc, et al, that when a phrase like ‘Nebula Winner’ has been reduced to the level of white noise, to mere bibble-babble, that it has lost its exclusivity, has lost the power to generate any electrical clout of exclusivity. The analogy holds for the slathering of ‘SFWA Member" on an unsolicited manuscript.

"Ectothermic rodomontade apart, in my view Paul is absolutely correct that, to a genuinely professional editor (not one or another of the jumped-up parvenus who fancy themselves ‘editors’ because they managed to get Marty Greenberg to adopt them for some goofy anthology idea), the appearance on a manuscript of the words ‘SFWA Member’ or ‘HWA Member’ has about as much power to command attention as the magical phrases ‘4-H Member’ or ‘Registered Voter, Libertarian Party.’ By the same token, none of those implied importunities will suggest to a reasonable editor that the manuscript ought to be, in Paul’s unfortunate words, flushed at the first opportunity.

"In something like forty-five years it’s been my overwhelming experience that editors as a group, with very few exceptions who don’t remain editors for too long, treat the slush pile as a necessary responsibility. An obligation. Neither a privilege nor a boon, but something like Respectable Charity. Doing good works among the terminally fanciful. It’s a burden, because every twit who ever wrote a line of astrological poetry in school deludes him/herself that s/he can be A Writer (if only they took the few scant moments necessary to do it). But it’s a burden all sedulous editors bear, with gritted teeth.

"And what compels them to be diligent about the chore—a chore that takes more time per increment of reward than any other of the multitudinous jobs an editor performs—are the few, rare, occasional treasures that surface from that Sargasso of crippled sentences and blotto story lines. Every editor longs to discover another Chip Delany or Richard Matheson in the over-the-transom effluvium. They envy the editors who found Dan Simmons and Eliot Fintushel and Lucy Taylor and Tananarive Due and Poppy Z. Brite in amongst the endless vampire New Age pseudo-X Files military pastiche crapola that inundates every accredited editor. They all read the nose-dripping and tone-deaf Philistinism because if they do find something tasty, and they pull it out, and work with the writer till it’s publishable, and it gets some notoriety . . . it raises the editor’s stock. S/he gains a rep for being astute, alert, perceptive, not to mention attentive to detail and touched by compassion. In short, for all the anomie and angst and simply mind-deadening boring time-consuming and mainly unrewarding effort of it, and despite the paranoia of hopeless amateurs who would rather deal in conspiracy than in logic, editors do read what comes in unsolicited. Look how smart I am, they can say; I was able to spot these fledglings when no one else could; they were rough clay, and I was able to shape them through dint of sheer talent on my part into the scintillant icon you now see published here. It is pure self-interest, so editors do it assiduously.

"Reading slush pile submissions, if you’ve ever done it—and I’ve done it, and every editor worth mentioning has done it at one time or another—is likely the most depressing, dismaying job in all of publishing. You just want to slash your wrists after a while . . . or slash somebody else’s throat . . . usually the person who suggested you put a ‘manuscripts wanted’ notice in Locus or the HWA Newsletter. After a while, and not too long a while, you hear a gibbering in your head that tells you to dash off to read a little Faulkner or Colette or Donald Westlake, for a couple of hours, just to remind yourself that there is such a thing as Real Writing.

"When I was engaged to be one of the five judges of the original Twilight Zone Magazine short story competition, years ago when TED Klein was the editor, we got something like ten thousand submissions, and out of that vast Gobi Altai of semiliterate and redundant manuscripts, we could not find ten that were of publishable quality. I found Dan Simmons at a Colorado Mountains writing workshop right around that time, and urged him to enter a story that subsequently won first prize. But the noise-to-signal ratio of that TZ contest is hardly out of line with the day-to-day reality of what an editor sees in the slush pile. And I’m afraid ‘SFWA Member’ doesn’t cut no mustard, don’t open no portals."