When Slush Reading is Worth It

The life of a slush editor can be trying. It's hard to understate the amount of terrible, terrible stories you get. There are some that are just banal, but others that are downright disturbing. I mean, there's frequently a point where you get to the fourth spousal abuse/killing/revenge story in a row, and you start to wonder about a career in marital counseling, because clearly there's a big need there.

 But there are also those amazing moments, the ones you keep reading for. Where you lift your head from where it's rested dejectedly in your palm, and remove your hovering mouse from the 'reject' button. Where you forget you're an editor and become an entranced reader again. It's happened to me only a very few times. Even fewer were the stories that struck me so deeply that I can clearly recall the first time I read them. It happened for Brass Canaries. And for Seed. And it happened once while I was reading slush for Clockwork Phoenix 4, a story by Benjanun Sriduangkaew called "The Bees Her Heart, the Hive Her Belly."

 

I remember being entranced, completely lost in the story – particularly rare because I've never been a huge fan of sci-fi. But it's hard for me not to love a story about a woman with a heart full of bees (literally). And it's worth noting that this was the ONLY non-solicited story that Mike picked to publish in Clockwork Phoenix 4.

 This is one of my favorite passages:

"She went to have her chest cut open and a small metal lattice installed between her breasts. When the bees became too much, she would open that little gate and let them out in a cascade of corpses and restless workers. The living ones always returned to Sennyi-as-hive, for they were creatures of habit. They drove her to eat voraciously and she developed a private memory. It jolted her to have a cerebral partition that could not be edited by anyone but herself. Still, what had already been forgotten couldn’t be brought back." 

Since CWP4 was published, I've followed the reviews, and in almost every one, they call out this story as one of the best. It gives me a sense of pride, even though my only real accomplishment was to put the "pass forward" label on instead of the "reject." Which, given that I think anyone could have seen how amazing this story was, really isn't much. But it's great all the same.

 Besides Clockwork Phoenix 4, Benjanun has been published in Clarkesworld (three times!), Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Giganotosaurus, and reprinted in The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year vol. 8 (the above story, as it happens), among others. And then, a few weeks ago, I was really excited to learn that Benjanun had been nominated for the John Campbell award for best new writer!! It's very well-deserved.

 You can read "The Bees Her Heart, the Hive Her Belly" here. I would call it R-rated; it doesn't have anything truly graphic, but it does have mentions of sex and so forth. But if you can handle the mentions, it's truly fascinating. I adore the ending. And you can see a list of Benjanun's stories at her website here. I'm excited to see where she goes next.

Random Pieces of Awesome

This morning, I'm posting on Trisha's behalf. Sabrina's Awesome List has inspired me to come up with a list of my own. My Awesome List is much more random than Sabrina's. Rather than being a list of All-time Awesomeness, it's more a list of Awesome Things My Kids and I Thought About Last Night.

It all begins with Imagine Dragons and It's Time. This probably won't stay on my Awesome List forever, but I certainly love it right now.

Last year, a friend of mine told me about The Perfect Recipe for Losing Weight and Eating Great by Pam Anderson. It's not a diet so much as a way of creating routines and rituals surrounding food that are fulfilling enough that you don't have to keep searching for that elusive contentment in the cookie jar. If you have food issues like me--this is a life changing book:

Horatio Hornblower was a TV show produced by A&E. Have you seen it yet? If you love swashbucklers, this is one for you. It's also a great book series, but I think you'll enjoy the books more if you watch the series first:

Ender's Game/Speaker for the Dead. With the exception of scriptures, no book has had a bigger impact on my life than these two books.

I agree with Sabrina's assessment of The Princess Bride and Howl's Moving Castle. They are made of awesome. I can't think of The Princess Bride without thinking of Ghostbusters, since they are the only two movies I've ever memorized.

Sometimes, my younger kids and I gather around the computer and take turns picking youtube videos. We have to suffer through the ubiquitous I'm Elmo and I Know It and then we get to the good stuff. When someone finally picks our favorite puppy video, even the teenagers wander into the room:

Psych. It is rare that a TV show makes me laugh this hard. It is even rarer to find a TV show that I like this much and feel comfortable watching with my family.

Clearplay. This is a special DVD player that will filter inappropriate things out of TV shows and movies. You get to decide what counts as inappropriate, and at what level. I can even share my favorite TV show ever with my kids without feeling embarassed. Which brings me back to when we pick youtube videos. I almost always pick this one. The most Awesome Action Scene ever.

The Awesome List

This week I read two amazing books: The Fault in Our Stars, by John Greene, and Code Name Verity, by Elizabeth Wein. Both were books that I'd come across recommendations for several times, but had just now read. Actually, it was someone here on the Prosers that convinced me to give The Fault in Our Stars a try. I tried to look up who it was, but the search feature wasn't helpful. :(

Anyway, recommendations are a tricky thing. So much depends on individual taste. For example, some people might say of me, "Well, she likes Star Trek and Downton Abbey and Harry Potter, but she also thinks that Black Sheep is one of the finest examples of film making in the last decade.”

I’m actually not entirely kidding about Black Sheep. It’s the best B-movie I’ve ever seen. They went for purposely funny instead of accidentally, and it actually works. But you see what I mean. There are a large number of people who are troubled by that amount of gore, and others who might rightly have zero interest in a horror movie about ravenous sheep. Farmers, for instance.

 So it seems to me that the perfect recommendation should be not just your favorite, but also something so unbelievably awesome that no one could really deny it. I mean, the perfect recommendation should be something where you might sort of secretly believe someone would have to be somehow deficient not to like (not that you’d say it). (Note, I don't actually think there's something wrong* with you if you don't like these. I'm just trying to make a point).

And thus, here is my awesome list, things where I think you absolutely can't go wrong. Some are funny, some are sad, some are a bit of a pain to get through. This list was going to be longer, but then I would envision someone telling me they didn’t like Monty Python, or Fullmetal Alchemist, and I could sort of understand that reaction. 

But there's the other side too - this kind of list shouldn't just be awesome things,but also awesome things you love. For example, I think anyone who doesn’t like Indiana Jones (at least the first one) is kind of silly, but I don’t love it with every piece of my heart. Lots of pieces, but not all of them. And along the same lines, the two books I mentioned above came very close to making it, but not quite. Honestly, I think I'm still processing them, and will need to read again. But not too soon, because I already cried too much over them in the past week.

So these are things made of pure, unfettered awesome, in their own ways. If you haven't encountered them yet, go forth in great haste to your library or bookstore!

Princess Bride

Have fun storming the castle!

Catch-22 

(Not the easiest book to read, and not the quickest read. But once you get it, it’s genius beyond imagining)

Diana Wynne Jones

I already blogged about her here.

Terry Pratchett

(I’ve been meaning to do a post on him for ages)

Girl Genius

Previously blogged here.

Firefly

I mean, I loved it so much, I named my cat Kaylee. Note close resemblance:

Sherlock

The Power of One, Bryce Courtenay

(The book, NOT THE MOVIE)

To Kill a Mockingbird. Harper Lee

The Last Unicorn, Peter Beagle

Wow, that’s really a lot shorter than I thought it would be. Honorary mention, perhaps, to A Fistful of Sky by Nina Kiriki Hoffman, because it’s awesome and lovely and heartwarming, but a bit uneven in pacing.

What makes up your awesome list? Please share!

(*Unless we're talking about the Princess Bride, because really, there's no excuse not to love that movie).