Slushing For ASIM

• For the few of you who have no idea what ASIM is, or think it's short for Asimov, it's Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, which I have mentioned in previous posts. I'm a second-wave member of the ASIM team - not the original bunch, but one of the next lot to join. People have come and gone over the years, but we still have quite a few who have been with the team since nearly the beginning and a few who have been there since the start. And somehow, we've kept it going and it's now up to issue 58. Mine, issue 60, will be out early next year and I'm proud to say that I have five first sales, including one poet and one story writer who had previously self published(well, most poetry has to be self published these days, so it was lovely for the author to finally be paid!)
  
  All but one of my stories I found in slush - and that one I asked to look at because I was short of submissions in that genre, and it turned out to be only a second sale. The author is herself a slush reader, though for a different publication. And here's where I am going to get to my point: we're a popular market. There are some Hugo and Nebula nominees out there who sold us their first stories. We're so popular that our slush wrangler, Lucy Zinkiewicz, is currently short of slush readers. I have agreed to take on more stories per week, but that really isn't enough.
  
  This is a volunteer thing. There's no money in it. But if you're a writer who wants to see the slushpile from the other side or an editor who currently has no work and wants to keep their hand in or just a reader who would like to read new stories, this is a good place to come. It's fun. My sister does one story a week, because she has done the Holmesglen writing and editing course and wants to keep her hand in.
  
  You don't have to be a professional. You don't have to live in Australia, everything is done by email. You just need to love speculative fiction. You can volunteer for as little as one story a week or as many as suit you. It's a real eye opener and if you are a writer yourself, you will have a better idea of what happens on the other side of the slushpile and maybe grumble a bit less when your masterpiece comes back. Or maybe, after having seen some of the submissions we get, you will appreciate why a story might be rejected, apart from the readers being philistines. ;-) In fact, we have a wide variety of readers, from the ASIM members, who are all writers themselves, to those who are just keen readers and think what they would and wouldn't be willing to pay for in a magazine.
  
  If interested, contact Lucy at asimsubmissions@gmail.com.