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It was rescued from the slush pile.

But the aforementioned old boys’ club of publishing keeps her in her place, fetching coffee and taking minutes for meetings — when she’s allowed into them — despite pulling Collins’ “The World Is Full of Married Men” from the slush pile and helping make it a success.

If someone pitched that story it would likely be thrown in the slush pile as hack work.

And the machines are already nibbling around the edges of my profession: Reuters reports that AI-generated books are popping up on Amazon, while the science-fiction magazine Clarkesworld just announced that it would temporarily close submissions because the slush pile was overwhelmed with machine-manufactured dreck.

Most reputable agents receive hundreds, if not thousands, of unsolicited pitch letters a year — the part of their inbox known as the “slush pile.”