News You Can Bruise for 2009 April 2 (entry 1)

(1) Thu Apr 02 2009 07:55 More Slush Pile Tips: A few left over from a draft I wrote while we were going through slush and forgot about.

• From one of my notes to Sumana: "It was refreshing to read a story about Christianity that wasn't all Ben Hur or Xenogears."
• If your story starts out as standard SF, the dead should not abruptly rise from their graves 80% of the way through. Yes, more than one story had this. Even more strangely, one person made it work, indicating the general presence of exceptions to rules.
• If you come up with an awesome title, use it, don't just mention it. That is, the title should have some bearing on what happens in the story. It should not just be the title of something else within the story. Like, imagine if A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again was not an essay about a trip on a cruise ship (truly a supposedly fun thing David Foster Wallace will never do again, in more ways than one), but in sooth an essay about the recording of a rock album called A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. You'd feel ripped off.

  Although if ASFTINDA really was a rock album you'd have no cause for complaint, because we don't expect rock album titles to relate to their contents unless it's a concept album with a narrative. Look, why are we arguing about this?

Comments:

Posted by Evan at Fri Apr 03 2009 18:19

now imagine if he'd used A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again as the title on the suicide note

(i know, its an awful grim thought, but had to be typed)