Slush Pile Ramblings
The challenge of slush reading is--and always has been--to efficiently weed out the junk without overlooking the gems. When I first started slush reading, I used a very simple algorithm: after two pages, am I hooked into the story? It's a pretty good algorithm, but it has its faults. Some stories, by their nature, must begin slowly in order to lay groundwork for the fantastic events to come. (Please note: I said 'slowly', not 'badly', and 'groundwork', not 'infodump'. *grin*) These stories come off as pretty good in the opening sequence, but not stunning. The trick is to recognize a story that starts slowly and ends up fantastic from one that starts slowly and ends up mediocre.

Now, after over a year of slushwork, I am beginning to recognize the various flavors of "disinterested". There's Parsing Difficulty (individual sentences are klunky, ambiguous, or otherwise difficult to process), Disbelief Crashing (Characters do or say things that seem banal and unrealistic), World Rejection (The story's milieu is too weird and otherworldly to be absorbed easily), Infodumpmania (Yup. Infodumping), Eeew-Icky (Blood, gore, profanity or socially dysfunctional characters), Nothing's Happening (just what it sounds like) and Just Plain Unengaging (Everything looks good, but it's just not grabbing me).

In my experience, stories of the World Rejection and Just Plain Unengaging variety are most likely to take off after a slow beginning. Infodumpmania and Eeew-Icky stories occassionally do, as well. The others are pretty much always worthless.