in the thick of it

The deadline for the August 2017 issue has passed. (We are accepting subs for the next issue--November 2017.) If you got your story in: THANK YOU!

Wow! We editors are in the thick of it, working hard on the awesome August 2017 issue of Electric Spec! We're currently carefully going through the slush pile. If you're not familiar with the terminology, slush pile refers to the stories authors send us. We are very grateful for the slush pile. For each issue of Electric Spec we get hundreds of stories submitted so it's a big job to go through them all. There are five editors that work their way through these submissions, and stories are assigned randomly to said editors. Each editor then decides to reject or hold-for-voting their assigned stories and send the author a relevant email.

Since we publish four issues a year this means we never take longer than three and a half months to decide on a story. Thus, if you ever send us a story and don't hear back within three and a half months something went awry. (Frankly, you should just send it in again. Querying us just slows down the whole process.)

Once we get through the slush pile we make ranked lists of the stories in hold-for-voting, I compile a ranked master list, and then is...The Production Meeting. I'll tell you more about that in August. Next week stay tuned for more slush tips. In August we'll start bragging about the upcoming issue with, hopefully, some author blog posts.