But let's, for God's sake, not deny what it is.
caw
The reality is one you don't seem to be aware of. Very few God writers keep writing short stories forever, or, if they do, they write fewer and fewer as their novels become more and more popular.
Editors have a constant and urgent need to find new short story writers. This is simply how it is. The ONLY way to find these new writers is by reading both the Mere Mortals and the Everybody Else stacks diligently.
If, as an editor, you don't do this, another editor will, and you'll be out of a job.
This does not, of course, mean they read every manuscript in the "everybody Else stack front to back. There's no reason on earth why they should. Bad is bad, and no matter who much writers would like to think otherwise, most of what editors see is
bad. Good is subjective, but bad stands out so much that anyone, except the writer, and probably his beta readers, can see it clearly.
But even with the Everybody Else stack, an editor reads until the writer puts up a big, neon stop sign. This stop sign may be in the first sentence, at the end of page two, or three fourths of the way through the story, but wherever it is, the writer put it there, and why should an editor go past it?
Editors, all editors, need a constant influx of new writers, and nothing thrills an editor more than finding an Everybody Else who hasn't suck a big, neon stop sign in his writing. It isn;t the editor's fault that this seldom happens.
And the fact remains that be you a God, or be you a Mere Mortal like myself, you were born an Everybody Else, and you morphed into a Mere Mortal or a God because of your
manuscripts.
We didn't get where we are because of who we know, because of luck, or because we learned a magic spell that made editors buy our stories. At some point, we say down, wrote a story, and submitted it to a magazine where it was promptly placed in the Everybody Else stack.
Depending on the magazine, a first reader or an editor, bleary-eyed and tired, started wading through the Everybody Else submissions. When he reached our story, maybe after discarding fifty others, he started reading, probably with very low expectations. But as he kept reading he perked up because the story interested him, and there was no stop sign. There wasn't even yield right of way sign. If he found a sign at all, it read "No speed limit. Put the petal to the metal and
go!
When he finished he probably muttered, "Well, hell, I have to publish this. But who am I going to reject so I can keep this one? No matter, I'll find someone. I have to buy this story, no matter
what."
This is how it works. We all come out of the Everybody Else stack. All of us, and we do so purely and simply because we give the editor story that's both good and original, that is, in some way, better than just about everything else he's read in that submission period.
A single story, even a good one, can get rejected at one or two or five magazines because it just isn't quite good enough that month, or because it just doesn't quite fit what an editor wants, but when story after story after story gets rejected at magazine after magazine after magazine, the problem is
always with the stories, not with the selection process.
It isn't reasonable to think an editor will read the Everybody Else stack with the same high expectations he has when reading the other stacks, but this in no way means he doesn't read them diligently, or that he rejects good, original stories from that stack.
It's
always the manuscript that matters, and almost every last one of us started life as Everybody Else. The only way we moved out of that stack was because the manuscript was so good it made an editor realize we were not just Everybody Else, we were, at the very least, Mere Mortals, and might even become Gods.
It's also true that an amazing number of stories from the God stack also get rejected, and this is further proof that the manuscript is what matters. Even Ray Bradbury said he'd been rejected every week of his life, including
this week.