“Season of Slush” by Bonnie Brunish

Season of Slush

February 2025 brought the first reading period of my tenure as Abyss & Apex editor. For seven days the floodgates opened, and stories poured in. As noted on our submissions page, we promise a response within six months.

Due to illness and attrition among our slush readers, about three hundred fifty submissions remained unread at the end of four months, and I decided that I needed to dive in myself to help clear out the backlog before the next reading period opened on August 1.

Reading slush is nothing new for me. I was an Abyss & Apex slush reader back in the 00’s. In 2010, I was Science Fiction Editor; this was before Brian Thies stepped into that role. I left for a few years to concentrate on writing my Galactic Mindsea Empire series before returning to Abyss & Apex as Art Director in 2020.

So reading slush was like returning to an old haunt. If anything, the quality of submissions seemed even better than I remembered from twenty years ago. But the fact remained that most of the stories submitted must be rejected.

We have two reading periods a year, and four ezine editions a year, so each reading period fills the slots in two editions. Story ideas should be fresh, especially in science fiction, so I don’t like a long delay between acceptance and publication. This means we can only accept sixteen stories in all, half science fiction, half fantasy, with at least a couple flash per reading period.

Since the number of submissions is over five hundred, this boils down to an acceptance rate of about 3%.

Our submissions page, unchanged since I became editor, explains what we’re looking for. Any story that can be characterized as horror and stories focusing on sex, gore, or current-day politics, garner an easy rejection.

I began my slush reading by making the easy rejections. There remained many good stories that had to be winnowed down. I rejected a few stories that lacked much of a speculative element. My next step in finding reasons to reject was to look up facts. Whenever I read a historical fantasy or historical science fiction story, I research the characters and time period. If the author has taken too many liberties, the story gets a rejection. Science-fiction stories must present believable future human or alien technology. Brian Thies has the final word on these. Fantasy stories with magical systems must be self-consistent.

By mid-July, only great stories remained. Now I had to look at how these stories fit in with upcoming Abyss & Apex editions. We need more than just a balance between science fiction and fantasy and the right proportion of flash pieces to longer stories. Other qualities come into play. There should be some dark works and some light (humorous) works, some puzzles or mysteries, some romantic tales, some lovable characters, some characters you love to hate. For the final selection, variety becomes a big factor.

Every accepted story got thumbs up from at least two readers. I chose some of them from among the stories the staff had held for a second opinion. When I was the first reader, I sent stories to them for their input. Thanks to outstanding efforts by Ef Deal and Anne Woods and to slush pinch-hitting by Danish author May-Lin Iversen, we gave every submission a final answer before the six months were up.

On August 1, the whole process began again.