In July 2013, I served as the “editor-in-residence” for the Codex Writing Group, which meant basically I was asking a month-long AMA (“Ask Me Anything”) interview. With Codex’s permission, I’m re-posting the Q&As here on my blog. The questions were all provided by members of Codex.

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What’s your advice for slush readers? Do you have recommendations for how I can avoid brain damage or avoid killing my soul, or is it already too late? Recommendations to avoid burnout? Time-management techniques? Do you have a spiel you give your new slush readers? Do you just assume they’ll burn out eventually and quit?

Well, I read slush at F&SF for nearly nine years, and I seem to have escaped without brain damage (mostly). For my Lightspeed slush readers, I think there’s less likelihood of burnout just because I use a larger team, so there’s less slush you have to tackle every day. When I was at F&SF–for most of my time there–I was the only person reading the slush, so I had to deal with all of it.

I don’t have much advice for avoiding burnout. I don’t think there’s really anything you can say or do; you’re either going to get sick of it or you’re not. I will say, though, that if you find yourself getting sick of it, you should probably do the right thing and quit, since it’s not really fair to the writers whose stories you’re reading if you’re burned out.

FWIW, I think reading slush is absolutely the best thing you can do to grow as a writer, at least when you’re still learning. (I don’t know that it would help established writers much.) Forcing yourself to read like an editor can really change the way you think about stories, and can change the way you start writing them. Most of the things you’ll learn won’t be conscious, concrete lessons; instead, it’ll be more like learning by osmosis.

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