Heh - I can't say any of the stuff we've seen so far is "bad" at all. There's been a couple that miss the mark, for sure. There's one or two with gobs of errors, grammatical and otherwise, but for that writer, English is not her first language, so I tend to cut her some slack on that. Correct it of course, but it's not a slash against the writer's natural ability.
The things that I have seen that irritate me the most are when writers don't read and follow the submission guidelines. Our Flash Fiction is 100-1000 words. Don't submit a 2000 word story under Flash Fiction and expect me to take 30 minutes to read and critique it if you can't follow simple instructions. The other is writers submitting poetry as flash fiction, or vice versa. Our guidelines stipulate each writer may only submit one story at a time, don't try to pull the wool over our eyes by submitting a second flash fiction piece as a poem... we know the difference!
A couple of the pieces we've seen so far are really good. One was recommended for publication with only a few minor personal suggestions from the editors, one needs minor tweaking before it's ready. And here's an interesting thing to note. Both of those pieces were submitted in a professional layout, typed, doublespaced, formatted like a story ought to be. Many of the other submissions might be entertaining to read, but invariably, the ones that need more work before they are of publishable quality are generally not presented in such a way that helps them to be taken seriously. Hint hint.
I'm not sure if the lack of formatting is a sign of the writer's inexperience as a writer, or not, but from what I've seen this far, quality of work and professional presentation go hand in hand.
