Hard to believe, it’s that time of year again, but here it is: Shocktober! And in my house, that means every night of the month up through the Big Day itself, we listen to a homemade mix of Old Time Radio, classic ghost stories, horror movie clips, and long forgotten monster songs that together make up the “10th Annual Shocktober Insomniacs Bedtime Old Time Radio and Audio Gallimaufry.”
I’ll be posting the playlists, day by day. So, here is Oct 1, 2025.
Intro: This is my Happening and it Freaks me Out!!!
Movie theme: Disney Haunted Mansion theme – Grim Grinning Ghosts
Poem: medley from Scholastic Records’ “The Haunted House & Other Spooky Poems & Tales”
TV program segment: Muppets – Happy Halloween from Janice & Uncle Deadly!
Commercial: Slime Monster Board Game by Mattel 1977
Short (Article/Sketch/Story): 3,000-Year-Old Secret Behind The Gingerbread Man
Monster Song: Johnny Frankenstein by Tony Carr And The Riff Riders (Southern Sound 1961)
Scenebite: from The Devil Rides Out: “The power of mind over mind…”
Drive-In Trailer: The Ghost and Mr. Chicken (1966)
Retro Baby Buggy Bumper: ABC Movie of the Week opening sequence, created in 1969
Old Time Radio Feature 1: “Thus I Refute Bealsley” & “The Book Shop” – Sleep No More – March 6, 1957
Old Time Radio Feature 2: “The Devil’s Doctor” – The Witch’s Tale – January 8, 1934
mp3s of shows available upon request to all substack @jedediahsmith1 subscribers
That evening as always, my wife and I were at home reading on the couch.
According to this, she said, more children disappear every year.
Looking up from my newspaper, I asked, How can that be when on our block children are running everywhere? I picked six out of the orange tree this morning.
Getting up, I headed for the kitchen to make a sandwich.
Could you fix me a drink while you’re up?
The usual?
Naturally, she said, and I walked straight through the kitchen, out the door, and into the house next door. I picked up the book I had left in my chair and sat down.
According to this, I said to my wife who sat in the other chair, the oceans are still rising.
How can that be, my wife asked, when you just read me a story about how we’re running out of water?
Getting up, she headed for the kitchen.
Could you fix me a drink while you’re up?
The usual?
Naturally, I said.
When she handed me my drink, I looked up and asked, did you just hear the paperboy?
There are no more paperboys, she said, just screaming children.
I got up and headed out the front door to see. Walking across the lawn, I entered the house next door through the kitchen and took the drink to my wife.
Sorry to put you to so much trouble.
No trouble, I said, picking up my newspaper and sitting back on the couch.
According to this, I said to my wife, they are running out of paper and will stop printing these soon.
I know, she said. They stopped months ago.
I realized I was not holding a newspaper but a cup of cocoa. Oh yes, I said, now I remember.
I headed upstairs to a bedroom. Inside thirty or forty children were jumping around, screaming and fighting with pillows, and I had to shout to be heard, Who ordered the cocoa?
“Prose poems. Working in the tradition of Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, John Lennon, and Jorge Luis Borges, Jedediah Smith uses surrealism and the absurd to travel easily between Homeric battle fields and Universal monster sets, quantum physics and the Fortean paranormal, archetypal mythology and modern pop culture.”
I received a rejection letter today for a novel manuscript I submitted. The letter was of that breed so typical today: “It’s not you, it’s us. We have to reject so many wonderful manuscripts because we just don’t have the resources to publish them.” It’s very polite, very civilized, and valueless.
No one wants to receive a rejection letter that says your pacing is slow, your characters flat, your scares weak, or your premise hackneyed. But it might help them write better. Constructive criticism helps writers just entering the field and builds stronger community standards, so its disappearance is an important factor in defining the state of horror publishing today.
The days when great genre editors like John Campbell, Donald A. Wollheim and Judy-Lynn del Rey would nurture new authors with rejections full of constructive criticism are long gone. Of course, this is not the fault of any one publisher. Critical responses take time, incur labor costs, and invite debate and/or bargaining with writers. And publishers are walking on such a razor edge to stay profitable with the few books they are able to accept that they have no resources to devote to letters explaining each rejection, no more than they do to expand their publishing line.
Then again, a growing number of small press publishers are turning this lack of feedback into a new revenue stream. For example, hopeful authors can opt for a paid submission in which they are promised a full page letter of criticism by the editor who has rejected their work. Some presses sell whole books produced in-house on how to get published. Some offer webinars or online workshops.
One has to wonder about the expertise and experience of the people offering all this advice. Many seem to have little to no editorial experience beyond their start-up press. And many are young enough that they are offering advice to people who have been writing longer than they have known how to read.
Having dipped my toe into this pool of criticism for hire, I have not always been impressed. Some offer personal tastes as canon (“No more vampires/zombies/apocalypses” or “sometimes/never employ head hopping”) or outmoded proscriptive grammar (“avoid the passive tense” and “Always avoid adverbs in your prose.” Always is an adverb. Physician, heal thyself.) The most common problem, though, is that most of the advice is so trite:
Read submission guidelines carefully
Don’t submit the wrong genre
Don’t use poor grammar
Be original
It’s not wrong to advise improved grammar, but as paid criticism it has a low dollar value. And I would argue that if a publisher is rejecting a manuscript for excessive grammar or spelling errors, it is incumbent on them to inform the submitter of that. If the writer submitted the wrong genre story or exceeded the word count in the instructions, then tell them so. Such a simple bit of information is not going to strain anyone’s resources, so sending a form letter that essentially conceals the fact is a cop out.
In fact, editors could inform writers of many more complex issues behind their decisions without putting in more work than they do now. Having taught college writing courses as an adjunct for 35 years, I am well acquainted with being overworked and underpaid. The student load and the writing requirements always grew, never diminished, and were always accompanied by demands for ever more robust critical analysis from the instructors. We solved this by developing response modules for every assignment. Experienced teachers could fill them out with barely a pause in their reading. And every year we turned English-as-a-second-language writers into fluent, eloquent A students.
So, does the submitted novel have a weak or slow opening? Note it on the module. Is there excessive exposition that is not embedded in action? Note that. Is the main conflict missing or undetectable? Put a note in the module. And if you find yourself saying the same thing over and over–find a teacher who can’t relate to that–then save it as a macro, or whatever tech hack you prefer. Then for each category, you’ll soon have 5 – 10 prewritten succinct, insightful pieces of advice to offer.
Y’know. If you want to. I’m getting the feeling that most don’t. For one thing, it’s curious that there is such a time crunch for publishers. It’s a given that the big presses are closed; no one gets to them without an agent, and no one gets to an agent without a…what? That’s for another column. So, the medium and small presses take all the weight. The ratio I hear most often of submissions to opening is 100 to 1. And very often, editors say they would be thrilled to publish ten or more out of that hundred, they’re that good!
But once again, “we don’t have the resources.” Why not? Is it like the poetry field where everybody writes and nobody reads? That can’t be: all the figures show an explosion in the growth of readership, especially as the means for conveying the written word multiply. Which also undermines the cost argument. Ain’t nobody going broke buying paper for books these days. So, what is it? Inefficiency? The loss of publishing traditions? Greed somewhere along the food chain? Big bad Amazon?
I do believe some of the people, and the companies they represent, care so little about writers, and by extension the writing itself, that they do not belong in the business. Some policy statements which tell me that include:
“Due to the large number of submissions, we only contact authors in the affirmative.”
“No simultaneous submissions…response time 6 months”
“We can’t promise that we will read every submission…”
“We generally read only half of the manuscript’s first page…”
Practices like these grow out of something more than a shortage of resources; they reveal a shortage of ethics. They are evidence of business conduct that is not worthy of the writers who are offering to work with them in a mutual venture.
For any editor or publisher who gets to this point, it might be time to ask yourself whether it isn’t time to get out of the business and make way for someone who can do a better job.
I’d like to know what other people’s experiences have been. If you have had books published, how did you break in with your first one? Is the industry getting better or worse?
Jedediah Smith 