Spam from the Slushpile

By Nick Cross

Here at Notes from the Slushpile we love comments, especially on this post (hint hint). But, whilst enabling comments on a blog helps to inspire debate and bring the readers closer to the content, there is also a downside. Sometimes - shock horror! - people disagree with us, or they have technical problems on their device that prevent them from commenting, or (even worse) they spend ages writing a comment that Blogger then swallows forever. And there is a group of commenters who we don’t want on the blog under any circumstances – the spammers.

A successful blog like this one receives a large quantity of spam comments. How large, I hear you ask? Well, at the time of writing, there were 3745 messages in the Notes from the Slushpile spam folder:



Now, this would be a nightmare for us to administer, were it not for the fact that Google (who owns Blogger) has a very clever algorithm for automatically detecting spam comments. So, for the most part, you can go on surfing our blog without ever having to know about the turbulence below the surface.

But, as writers, we all know the feeling that what we’re writing is falling into a void. We send out streams of queries to agents and publishers, with no idea if anyone is even reading the material, let alone responding with anything more encouraging than “meh.” Do the spammers feel that way too? Maybe they’re sending thousand upon thousand messages out there in the hope that one – just one – will connect with a living human being.

Spammers of the world, it’s your lucky day! Because I’m here to dig deep into the spam folder and provide the critique that your unique work so richly deserves...

Notes from the Critique Group

By Maureen Lynas

When Candy said - Would you like to start blogging on the slushpile again? - I said yes immediately. Then spent two months thinking – what about?

The size of my slushpile? Done. It’s even bigger than when I first blogged about it. It wobbles now. Sometimes it sways. It may topple.

The seven steps to pacing and plotting? Done. But I could talk about the steps for ever. So that theme was a possible.

The five bricks of story? Done.  I think I'm up to seven now.

Show not tell? Done, said Maureen as she exhibited frustration, annoyance and desperation through her body language.

To procrastinate I read Jennie Nash's excellent post on writing groups (on Jane Friedman’s blog) because our SCBWI BI York group was about to meet.