Late-October/November/early-December SQUID replies will be going out tomorrow.
And I am going to be revising my submission guidelines soon to say "No SASE, no reply, sorry."
Weird trend of this month's SQUIDs: two ms. involving the 1918 Spanish influenza epidemic.
Also something I was thinking of reading a couple recent submissions: If your manuscript is in third-person limited POV, take one chapter, cut out all of the internal monologue, and stick it in a drawer for a week. Then go back and see how much of that monologue really absolutely HAS to be in the scene for said scene to make sense. The reason I say this is because internal monologue very, very easily slides into redundancy or telling, and it can also very easily slow up a scene (especially a dialogue scene, if the narrator thinks something after every line); and not to put too fine a point on it, these things drive me crazy. Thank you.
Sort of like what Mark Twain said about the word "very," notwithstanding my use of it above: "Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very'; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be."
Also coming soon: a review of the play "Doris to Darlene, a Cautionary Valentine" at Playwrights Horizons.