"Thomas F. Monteleone - Tales of Terror and Madness" - читать интересную книгу автора (Monteleone Thomas F)

drank some absinthe, had some sex, killed somebody. Can you say stunted
imagination? We thought you could.

But as the weeks became months, and we worked our way through all the
hastily-sent "trunk" stories, we began to see better fiction. Most of it
arrived by e-mail, with a very small percentage through regular mail,
and practically no one requiring the entire manuscript be returned. It
seemed like we would sit down every evening to read ten or twelve
stories, and every morning, there would be twenty new ones taking their
place. It was incredible. We believed we were keeping up by reading
submissions every day, but in reality, we began to get buried.

When we were approaching seven hundred

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Introduction

submissions, we still had more than two hundred to read, and we had
maybe room for five more stories. We had to push up the submission
deadline ... or we would never finish close to our original schedule.
The plain fact was we'd been overwhelmed by the response. We were
reading nothing in our lives other than stories for From the
Borderlands, and we were holding up as well as a thatched roof in a monsoon.

The major reason this became an increasingly more challenging problem?
We'd made a commitment to give every submission a fair reading, and make
an attempt to provide honest criticism and real reasons why we were
rejecting or accepting the story. In case you didn't realize it, that
takes a lot more time than just saying: "sorry, not quite right for us."
(Actually, we did say that in a very small percentage of the cases-only
when a story was so completely not right, and we had nothing
constructive to say.) Most of the time, we provided our writers with
personalized responses, which is more feedback than they usually get.

Most writers seemed to recognize and appreciate our effort; we received
lots of e-mails telling us our rejection notes were some of the most
informative and helpful they'd ever received. Of course, we also got
some snide responses (usually from veteran writers who assumed all they
needed to do was send us anything and we'd accept it [we didn't]),
expressing their disagreement with our editorial opinion. Hey, that's
why America's a great country...

And while we're doing such a bang-up job of complimenting ourselves, we
should also tell you we made it a policy to not read when we were too
tired or too

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