Tag: First Pages

The Shadow Mountain Slush Pile opens soon so I thought I’d better do another… TIPS FROM THE SLUSH PILE! Shadow Mountain recently made the change to limit submissions to 50 pages. You’ll notice this does not include a word count. Yeah, so did some people submitting. Your 50 pages should have: – 1 inch margins […]

Tips From the Slush Pile! Y’all. You know how I feel about Prologues, right? That they’re usually an excuse to infodump and don’t actually benefit the story. Just got a submission that not only has an Prologue but an Epigraph. **Now with more infodumping!** Woot. Please do not do this to me. I want to […]

Tips From The Slush Pile! (The slush is open, so you had to know this was coming…) I’ve been told I include too many negative examples in my tips. Today, I’m taking a cliched opening (that I’ve already seen several times this week) and I’m gonna tell ya how to make it *not* cliche. Cliche: […]

Shadow Mountain’s slush pile is open! And you know what that means… Tips from the Slush Pile! Please don’t have your character break the 4th wall to introduce themselves. It’s happening so often, it’s becoming cliche. I’m not even halfway through the slush and already the tally for this sort of opening is the highest […]

Tips from the Slush Pile: Don’t start with “It was a dark and stormy night…” Just…don’t. Because stories that do this inevitably go on to say well, no it wasn’t that stormy and it was actually the middle of the afternoon and quite sunny. It’s not funny and most importantly, it’s not original. I see […]