Guest Post: Five Years Later, Did We Learn Anything? by Paul Riddell
International Slushpile Bonfire Day is over, for another year. The ashes are cold, the gin pail is dry, and for most editors and agents, the slushpiles are already starting to build up.
In this article, Paul explains the origins of ISBD, for those of you who can stand the metafiction.
Five years ago -- about a month before I finally snapped, saw reason for the first time in twenty years, and stopped deluding myself that writing for science fiction publications was anything approximating a career -- I had a bit of fun. At the time, I was writing regular articles for the Webzine Revolution Science Fiction on various subjects, and I was also letting my id run wild under the name of "Edgar Harris". Edgar came from a rather large extended family of writers, and counted Raoul Duke, Cordwainer Bird, and Kilgore Trout as uncles and inspirations. As such, he proceeded to write all sorts of articles (until RevSF was taken over by the sort of people who think that winning a Writers of the Future competition actually means something) on such diverse subjects as: Comics Journal publisher Gary Groth being hospitalized for hate mail addiction; George Lucas suing to have the US ballistic missile defense system renamed "Star Wars"; Harlan Ellison as an extremely sophisticated literary warrior robot; and the saga of the official Jar-Jar Binks urinal cake.
However, the one that got any notice outside of the science fiction community was the coverage of International Slushpile Bonfire Day.
Having been a nonfiction writer, save for occasional forays into attempts at humor, I was never asked the question "Where do you get your ideas?" the way fiction writers are apparently asked. (I was regularly asked if my parents' divorce proceedings would still leave them brother and sister, but that was to be expected.) However, I was regularly asked, mostly by editors and beginning writers who couldn't believe that I'd dare write something that inflammatory, "So where did you get the idea for that?"
By "that", they meant "anything that crushed the dreams of the tens of wannabe writers who came across it". Never mind that most wannabe writers, and many published ones, are completely delusional about their place in the universe and completely ignore any and all hints that they're regularly mocked, in the same way that most English majors are delusional that their chosen degree is anything other than part of a plot to prevent wage inflation at Borders and Barnes & Noble chain bookstores. Precious few people actually noticed, for the same reasons why even pepper gas and tasers won't prevent your friendly neighborhood Cat Piss Man from continuing to submit Doctor Who/The Red Green Show fanfiction to every venue in sight.
The concept was quite simple, and it tied directly into the same level of denial I've seen in other aspects of entertainment. We all know the crazed Trekkie, the one trying to get her ears bobbed so she can pass for Vulcan, who laughs and laughs about the famed William Shatner "Get a life" speech, because she knows someone else who's a little too addicted to Star Trek. When the Robert Altman adaptation of Michael Tolkin's book The Player first came out, everyone on Hollywood was talking about how they knew someone else who was as amoral and thoughtless as the fictional Gordon Mill. (What was particularly funny at that time was that I was working for the editor of a movie magazine who related all sorts of horror tales about similar treatment of writers by producers, and how it was just a matter of time before the writers struck back, all without realizing that he'd already cultivated such a reputation for fucking over writers that the only sound at his funeral would be the sound of hundreds of screwed-over freelancers and staffers shitting on his corpse.)
Likewise, editors can pull out huge stacks of the sort of swill that regularly infects the mailbox at science fiction magazines and read them to huge crowds of laughing fans as examples of what they get every damn day, but the worst offenders go home smirking about how they're the exception. They don't see themselves as the problem, and they simply refuse to do so.
And that's what set off the story of International Slushpile Bonfire Day.
The difference between base cruelty and cultivated sadism is knowing the right words to cause the most damage. For various horrible reasons, I found myself on the bulletin board for an online "resource" for science fiction writers ("resource" meaning "place to hide when the real world tells you that getting stories accepted at nonpaying online venues doesn't make you famous, no more than having Fat Elvis's gut, Buddy Holly's glasses, and Phil Collins's hair makes you a rock star"). When one of the regulars started whining about how he had such problems with getting responses to his submissions that he wondered if editors called HAZMAT teams when they saw his return address on manuscript envelopes, I didn't tell him directly that at least one editor I knew visibly shuddered whenever one of his literary cowpies arrived, complete with the notice "Member, SFWA" on the cover letter, with the bills and junk mail. Naw, that would have been mean.
Instead, that little whimper built up nacre, combining with my own writing and editorial experiences, merging with the faces of the innumerable idiots who learn NOTHING when wasting their time at writer's workshops and "How To Get Published" panels at conventions, and what crawled out was a new and much-needed holiday. Oh, and the howls of "I didn't think that was funny at all" and "That was in extremely bad taste" echoed across the publishing community.
Five years later, I look back upon the vast majority of my published works with nothing but fear and loathing. The Alex Winter short film "Entering Texas" was the source for the best description of my or anyone else's career in science fiction: after watching Butthole Surfers lead singer Gibby Haynes masturbate into a frying pan, one of the characters says "He's just greasing the pan, dear. It's special grease." However, I still have a bit of pride in the tale of International Slushpile Bonfire Day: whenever I get thoroughly tired of dolts telling me "You need to go back to writing," I look back upon that little missive and smile. It's not just enough to encourage the idea that the life work of most "writers" are so foul that their work automatically gets dumped into a furnace somewhere: we should all encourage the idea that the torching will be a public event. To paraphrase a bumper sticker given to me by a friend fifteen years ago, "Slushpiles don't burn by themselves. You need to help. Learn to burn."
The only way Paul Riddell is returning to writing, particularly anything involving science fiction, is if that work is immediately followed by a large-caliber bullet in his brain. Robert E. Howard, H. Beam Piper, Ernest Hemingway, and Hunter S. Thompson had the right idea.
I'd like to thank Paul Riddell for so generously allowing me to resurrect and run with his concept. Perhaps someday I will.
