From John Joseph Adams blog.

Three science fiction magazine editors answer this question.

What plots are you sick to death of seeing, and/or what would you like to see more of?

Van Gelder: Currently, the plot I’m seeing most often is: A previously unheard-of virus comes along, alters all of humanity in a way that has never before occurred, and one lucky person is immune. We’ve run a couple of stories with this plot already and it’s quickly growing tiresome. I’ve also been getting lots of alternate history stories about different outcomes to the Civil War or to World War II.

What would I like to see more of? Well, if Santa got my list, this year I’ll be getting more science fiction stories like "Finisterra" and "The Merchant at the Alchemist’s Gate" that are really good and don’t seem to follow the same paths as most of the other science fiction stories I’m reading these days.

Williams: I never know which plots I want to see more of until I see them, because they’re the plots that do something I’m not expecting to see. I would definitely like to put a short-term moratorium on stories that lead off with exploding spaceships. Exploding spaceships that happen further into the story are currently okay, however.

Groppi: We’ve been seeing an awful lot of retold or reworked fairy tales. Of course, we’ve also bought a fair number of them, so I can see why people keep sending them, but at this point we’re a little burnt out. Retellings are difficult, because on the one hand they can leverage a lot of emotional and narrative power by tapping into these familiar images and plots, but authors really need to be thinking about whether they’re bringing anything really new or meaningful to the retelling.

We also see a lot of what I’ve started calling the "foofy slipstreamy stories," pieces that are very lyrical, very image-driven, and sometimes very beautiful, but also kind of insubstantial, with no clear sense of what the dream-like magical images mean, or whether they’re even real. Again, this is a type of story that we’ve developed a reputation for favoring, which is undoubtedly why we get so many of them, but I’m tired of them at this point.

Speaking just for myself, and not necessarily for my co-editors, I would love to see more science fiction. Something with robots, or quantum physics, or alien contact. I’m really a science fiction reader at heart, and not a fantasy reader.

Reading this, if I were trying to write any fiction beyond extremely short pieces I'd appreciate the commercial head up. But as a reader, "retold fairy tales" is an entire genre (in the popular sense of the use of the word). All fairy tales are retold. The brothers Grimm were remaking new stories. And I don't think there is really an end to the potential to imbue them with new meanings. Of course it can be done badly, as what can't. As a reader, I'd love to see a really first rate horror writer tackle Hansel and Gretel. Child abandonment, imprisonment by a serial killer, during a time of horrifying poverty - maybe the thirty years war.

The push drabble is now closed.

The new prompt is hush

Gar, as an editor, I'd like to see that story too.

Caffeine gods, I implore thee, help me out, for I have signed up for NaNo. Another YA writer asked if I'd do it to keep her company and since I need a good disciplinary spanking, I figured this was as good a way to go.

Anyone else doing it? I'm on as Barb Ferrer with the space and everything.

I'm seriously contemplating it, Barb.

Is it cheating if you already have something started? Maybe I could finish the zombie book ...

I don't think it's cheating at all. I mean, yeah, the idea is that you write a novel from scratch, but phooey to that, I say.

When I did it in '04, I already had like 20K on LUCKY THIRTEEN and added another 65K during NaNo. So I neither started nor finished it, but I did do a big, horkin' chunk of it and met the 50K goal, so I considered myself a winner.

Hmmmm.

The hush drabble is now closed.

The new prompt is machinery.