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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How much weight beyond general guidance do you put in the slusher’s score. For example, if someone marks a submission as a 10, do you put a lot of weight on that piece, more than you would perhaps otherwise?

If I happen to notice that the reader gave the story a 10, I’ll certainly go into reading it with high hopes. Sometimes, if I don’t notice that beforehand (i.e., I just open up my Kindle and start reading without referencing the submission system), if the story doesn’t click for me, I’ll go back and give it another shot at another time if the reader rated it very highly. Sometimes I’ll also ask for a second opinion from other staff.

How many stories generally get passed to you with a 10?

Not too many. Keep in mind, 10 is supposed to be reserved for stories that are among the best ever. Like I would give a 10 to “Flowers for Algernon” and “The Deathbird” and stuff like that, but there’s lots of stuff I LOVE that I would still hesitate to give a 10. Of course, everyone doesn’t necessarily rate things EXACTLY as I do.

It doesn’t appear that that’s something I can check in the submission system, alas. Though I imagine it wouldn’t be that hard for the sysadmin to figure out. All the data is in there, after all. Of course we used to use a different sub system, so this would only have data going back to Jan. 2012 or so.

Are there slushers (without naming names, of course) that have consistently shown a talent for mirroring your tastes such that you always feel good about their top recommendations?

That’s kind of hard to say, just because I have my “slush scale” set so that readers should be mostly just saving me from having to look at stuff that clearly isn’t ready for prime time, so if they’re doing their job right, they’re passing up a lot of stuff to me that they know probably isn’t good enough, but it IS good enough to warrant letting me take a look.

That said, I have noticed certain readers seem to match up with me more often than some of the other readers. Not to the extent that I think I’ve discovered an editorial twin or anything, but still.

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