Janet and I finished making our decisions tonight regarding submissions for the field guide, and emailed out final acceptances and rejections (all but one, which Janet is accepting provisionally, and she'll email the author tomorrow). If you submitted a botanical specimen, you should have heard from us. If not, be patient; it may just take a while for email to catch up to you.

The final shortlist was full of extremely difficult decisions. As Janet sez: "There were a number of submissions that, while good, were very similar to other good submissions, sometimes down to the name. I think I've mentioned that we received several carnivorous plants, and that was probably the most commonly occuring feature (this won't be reflected in the final book). [...] Also, making the final decision is hard -- there's already been a few times where it's come down to thinking about the submission in terms of the illustration it would inspire. (Yeah, I know. Artist as editor -- scary thought.)"

We ended up with about 50 specimens (out of 175 submitted), including entries from Eric Schaller, Jay Lake, Victoria Elisabeth Garcia, Ben Peek, Toiya Kristen Finley, and many other groovy folks. When we come up with a table of contents, you'll see it here.

***

On the other side of the editing fence, I got a "no" from A Public Space, though this wasn't too surprising, since the litmag seems to be the unwilling offspring of The Paris Review (as the editor, Brigid Hughes, was at the helm of both journals), and is hence extremely competitive. I'll keep sending them stories, because they're probably my favorite new literary journal.

But to balance that out, my story "The Time Traveler's Son" was sold to erzebet for the Miniatures in Print line of her Papaveria Press. Yay, w00t, and kick ass! Erzebet does an incredible job with her gorgeous handbound volumes, and I'm extremely jazzed by her concept for the book's design. It will be produced in extremely limited numbers (as in, less than 20), and will hopefully be available before the end of the year.

I'm so excited I just peed a little.

The deadline approacheth. It is now one week until the end of the reading period for A Field Guide to Surreal Botany. Just so you know.

I imagine it'll take us another week or two (or three or four) to make our final decisions and send out the last rejections, as well as acceptances. Then, we'll take our time crafting the table of contents (one of the most fun parts of an editing gig), and then Janet will spend as much time as she needs to illustrate each entry. This may mean that the book comes out late this year, or sometime early next year, but we won't be putting it out before it's ready. Our last two books were put together extremely quickly, and though we're very proud of the quality of them both, we were unhappy with how we (but mostly I) placed artificial deadlines on them and felt rushed to meet those deadlines. Not this time. We have too much on our plate right now to worry about the added stress of a publishing venture that we do as a hobby.

Also, apropos of reducing stress and distractions, I've greatly reduced my friends-list, halved it in fact. Please don't take offense if you were caught up in the culling, it's nothing personal. I've just been tired of spending hours reading through pages and pages of entries, and skimming through a great many of them.

No, I'm not watching Chimp Boy's State of the Union, so that I can bring you the following cool news (though if you're watching, you can dull the pain with the George W. Bush 2006 State of the Union Drinking Game).

Ellen Datlow just emailed me the wonderful news that Daniel Wallace's story "Vacation" (first published in Off the Map) will be reprinted in volume 19 of The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror! Yay! W00t! And so forth! It's a kick-ass story, and I'm so glad it will get further recognition. Congratulations, danielwallace!

In a superhuman feat of organization and derring-do this afternoon, I managed to completely record and produce this week's episode of Lies and Little Deaths. I'll be posting it a little later on tonight.

In locus_blinks today, there was a notice that the content at Infinity Plus has just been updated, including mentions of fiction by Chris Dolley, Gary Couzens, and yours truly. Very nifty.

I discovered through MoorishGirl this afternoon that a woman named Michelle Lin who was in grad school at NCSU the same time I was, and was in one of my fiction workshops, is now living in Brooklyn and running a very cool blog called New York Brain Terrain.

deannahoak proves once again how incredibly cool and helpful she is. I sincerely hope that when I've sold my novel, that she is the one to copyedit it.

Paul Graham shows us How to Do What You Love. Fun and work don't not have to exist as polar opposites, and it's good to be reminded of that.

And hey look! cmpriest has a story up at Lone Star Stories! Go check out "10 Archetypes in 2000 Words." And jennreese has a poem in the same issue! Go read "Strange Pageantry" too.

I have a big pile of final papers to grade for my evening class, due on Monday afternoon (originally, they were due Friday, but I wasn't able to make it to campus when the site supervisor wanted, so he pushed it back. Yay, because I got a little more breathing room). Final grades will be computed, and results will be emailed to students.

I'm also copyediting a huge dissertation chapter for the grad student I share a cube with. He just came by to deliver more pages. This will take up quite a bit of the weekend.

And knowing that I had all this work ahead of me, I did what any sane person would do...I went shopping!

Well, sort of.

This morning, we went by the post office so that I could send off my submission for Polyphony, as well as a book to the_red_shoes, then we went to the nearby Blockbuster and dropped off The 40-Year-Old Virgin (which was hilarious). Afterward, we had breakfast at the Whole Foods hot bar, which was awesome. Then we headed to the state fairgrounds for the flea market, and scored big.

A sculptor from Richmond was selling intricate puzzle boxes individually painted, and we bought one of a lizard and some frogs sitting on top of a bundle of bamboo (which covers every surface of the box); it's really gorgeously done, and both of us were immediately drawn to it. I got a winter cap from Nepal that has earflaps and braids that come down past my shoulders. Janet found a long wool/jute rug made in India that fits perfectly in a particularly cold spot in our bedroom. We picked up some fresh potatoes and onions, as well as some stocking stuffers. And at the secondhand bookstore, I nabbed copies of Time's Arrow by Martin Amis (which I'll be using to beef up "A Lull in the Conversation") and The Stranger by Albert Camus. All of this for less than $85. Flea market = teh r0xx0rs.

Oh, and you may have missed it unless you're a subscriber, but I snuck another podcast up yesterday. Episode 1.5, an interstitial episode since there is no fiction read, but I do a couple of audio reviews, of tim_pratt's The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl and 14theditch's The Girl in the Glass. Go give it a listen. I've also created an LJ feed (lld_feed), so you can be notified whenever a new ep goes up. I'll be doing a new full podcast sometime next week, where I'll read "Enlightenment" and blab for a bit about Buddhism.

Okay, off I go to the editing mines. Wish me luck.

Okay, eliminating some tabs...

Boing Boing points to a couple of cool things (well, more than a couple, but these are the two that most caught my fancy recently):

Alphabet evolution animation, which shows how the written alphabet has changed, from Phoenician to Greek to Etruscan to Latin. The similarities are certainly there, but it's cool to see how it all evolved into the letters we use today.

Dean Grey Tuesday: Save American Edit mashup album! "Today is Dean Grey Tuesday, a net-wide day of protest over Warner Brothers' attempt to censor a stupendous noncommercial mashup album called American Edit that remixes Green Day's album American Idiot." Mirror sites are being set up all over teh intarweb today to stick it to the man.

Fantasy Bookspot has a new interview with Kelly Link.

Jed reviews Æon Flux, and gives me even more reasons to wait for the $1.50 theater to see this film.

~

It started here, continued here, and was rounded up here (though I may have missed some points inbetween); this would make a great WisCon panel, btw. Anyway, the talk about the gender disparity in the big SF mags/anthologies, and the fact that some smaller venues (Lone Star Stories, Jabberwocky, Nine Muses) buck the trend by having ToCs heavily (or totally) favored toward women authors, has gotten me thinking about my editing stint on Scattered, Covered, Smothered. In the comments of Justine's post, I mentioned that our final Table of Contents was exactly split down the middle, 15 male and 15 female, and that I was extremely proud of this.

And I have to preface this by saying I did not intentionally set out to do this. I was looking for good stories, period, and it happened to work out that we got the even split. I frankly thought it was remarkable that we got as many submissions from male writers, because of our food/cooking theme (which may say something about my preconceptions, or society, or both). I think the quote is from Gordon van Gelder who says that he doesn't pay attention to gender when considering stories for F&SF, that he's just looking for good stories. But the thing that's interesting about that statement is the emphasis on and attention paid to the word "good." "Good" is highly subjective, especially in this field, and it comes with a lot of baggage attached. When you say that this story is better than that story, you're bringing a whole messload of assumptions and preferences into the mix. This is why young authors (myself included) are encouraged to send a story right back out after it gets rejected; what one editor prefers will be different with the next editor. And part of this is gender preference, whether intentional or not.

Editors obviously have to look at the level of writing in a piece of fiction in considering it for publication. They also look at subject matter; certain genres will not be accepted at mainstream literary journals, just as quiet contemplative character studies most likely won't make it into F&SF (though I don't want to make generalizations here; exceptions certainly can occur). So the editor is looking for a certain type of fiction, written at a significantly advanced level; they know what they like, and that's what they accept.

I also used these criteria (quality and subject matter) for the anthology, but after that, I didn't care, which is why our book is as eclectic as it is, and why it has confounded some reviewers. We have science fiction, high fantasy, slipstream/infernokrusher/whatever, absurdist, contemporary contemplative, Lovecraftian horror, historical romance, and several other subsets of "food-related fiction." I'm a catholic (little "c") reader, and I like all of this stuff, so as long as it was well-written, interesting, and contained food or cooking in some manner, I was willing to consider it. And possibly because my own reading proclivities were not so limited, it meant that I got a more even distribution between male and female submitters.

I certainly can't speak for the big-time editors, and wouldn't want to. I didn't use any kind of literary affirmative action when I was editing, and I wouldn't suggest that they do either, but it is something to keep in mind. Maybe there just aren't as many women submitting to those big venues as do to the smaller ones, I don't know; the "stats" section of this post is a good start, but I wouldn't mind seeing a more definitive survey being done.

Anyway, I've blabbed enough about this.

Okay, I know I've posted about this before, but for the life of me, I can't find the previous entry. So if you'll bear with me, I'm going to ask this question again.

One of the grad students who works near me at CTE has asked me to proofread his dissertation, since he's defending it at the end of December. It'll be on Transportation Engineering (though I'm not sure what his focus is until I read the book), and it sounds like it'll require some light editing, since he's from Korea and English is his second language. It's about 300 pages long, and I'll need to turn it around within a couple of weeks. Since the semester at St. Aug ends this week, and the one at Wake Tech ends in a couple weeks, I should have the time to be able to take this on. And I could use a little extra money right now.

So it comes down to rates. This is a very academic piece of writing (natch), and I'll have some familiarity with the terms, since I've come across some of them with my job. What should I charge the guy? Should I set a fixed rate, or go hourly? I have some ideas, but I don't want to screw the guy over (he is a grad student after all); conversely, I want to make sure I get properly compensated for my work. Suggestions in the comments are heartily encouraged.

Thanks in advance.

Somewhat related to the last entry, an article in the Guardian about the decline of editorial authority in book publishing: "Black day for the blue pencil."

I can see some of Morrison's points here, but on the whole, I think I'd have to disagree. I haven't dealt with A Big New York Publishing House (yet), but the writer friends of mine who have have mentioned that their editors still provide much direction and/or suggestions on their books. This from Tim Pratt (who also supplied the above link):

My editor [Juliet Ulman at Bantam] . . . has been very hands-on, writing detailed and insightful letters, helping me shape and refine the book, helping me make clear things that are obvious to me, but not so clear to the reader. She's helped me with big-picture stuff and (to a lesser extent, because my prose is fairly clean) on a line-by-line level. Juliet told me she wanted to make the good book I wrote into the great book it could be. I dunno if we succeeded, but it's a much better novel than the one I sold her originally! And the one I sold was made better by the insightful criticism of my agent, Ginger. There comes a point in any novel, for me, when I get so close to the work that I can't see it anymore -- all I see is details, and the sense of the whole is lost to me. That's when a good editor is crucial, I think. Granted, working with a bad editor, one who is too pushy or who doesn't get your vision or has other big flaws, can be frustrating and annoying, but I've had precious few run-ins with bad editors, fortunately.

And from Barth Anderson, whose editor is, also, Juliet Ulman:

After so many passes through this damn book, it's amazing to feel the burn for Patron Saint [of Plagues] again. But Juliet and her editorial letter (which I received over the weekend) have completely re-enthused me for this project. I mean, hell, I wrote the first version of this damn thing in 1998, at Clarion. Egad! Anyway, I've found a common thread in Juliet's comments, fixes, and criticisms, which has given me a strange, new angle on the book -- like seeing it all new and untouched, and yet whole and finished at the same time. Hard to explain. But it's got me jazzed and jizzed and itchy to write.

Okay, maybe those examples aren't the best because they're both talking about the same editor, but I've heard this from other sources as well. Cory Doctorow often sings the praises of Patrick Nielsen Hayden, as does almost everyone who works with him. Yes, the publishing industry is a fast fast fast business, but there are still many editors who do a valuable and insightful job on the books they work on, and I think it's kind of a cop-out to say editors on the whole aren't doing their jobs as well now because Anne Rice or J.K. Rowling (not sure about this, but jeez, have you seen her adverbs?) refuses to have her work edited, or they aren't Maxwell Perkins or Ezra Pound.

Speaking from a magazine point of view, almost every story I've sold has undergone revisions at the request of the editor. Their suggestions made the stories better, and even when I sometimes didn't quite agree, or really hated to lose that really beautiful sentence or phrase, I trusted that they knew what they were talking about. Ironically, the one story that required no revision was the one pro sale I've made, "Reality, Interrupted" to The Third Alternative. I sent the story to Andy Cox, and he published it word for word, with no changes. I'm not sure if this says anything about the quality of the writing or Andy's editing style, or if it was just lucky happenstance that he liked it exactly how it is.

deannahoak, copyeditrix extraordinaire, presents "Zen and the Art of Copyediting."

Copyeditors are such an essential part to making a book a reality. A bad one can make a book awkward and clunky and, possibly, a failure. A good one can brighten sentences, clarify grammar, and make the prose so easy to read that it feels as if the words are inside your brain instead of on the page.

And most times, they are invisible, working behind the scenes, fixing, tweaking, and fine with not being noticed. They are rarely mentioned in author acknowledgments.

So hug a copyeditor today. They make the books you read even better (hopefully); don't they deserve it?

A coworker just mentioned that he's finishing up his dissertation and needs someone to proofread/edit the thing. Luckily, I happen to be someone. But I've never really done this sort of thing, and don't know exactly what to charge for my services. What would be a good rate? I want to make sure I get compensated for my time, but the guy is a fellow grad student, and I don't want to rip him off. So what's fair? You tell me.

marrael and I didn't leave the apartment much this weekend. We headed out to Quail Ridge yesterday for the big Crossroads event, which ended up turning into a skiffy con panel. Attending were John Kessel, Mark Van Name, Richard Butner, Fred Chappell, Ian McDowell and Bud Webster, and they read from portions of their stories in the anthology and talked about its troubled publication history. We saw Andreas and Luna there, and Dan Reid (who, thank god, is taking over Trinoc*con literary programming for next year), and I saw a bunch of my creative writing classmates from NCSU. I got my copy signed by all the authors in attendance, and afterward Janet and I walked to the Whole Foods next door for a quick grocery run.

Other than that, we've been home this weekend. Janet finished working on commissioned cover art yesterday. Today, both of us pored through the remaining submissions to Scattered, Covered, Smothered and decided who would stay and who would go. I've now sent out all acceptances and rejections, so if you haven't heard from me, email me immediately in case your contact info has changed or your spam filter was too stringent. I'm holding off a few days announcing the table of contents since I've asked a few authors to do revisions before I accept their stories, but it'll definitely be by the end of this week.

In lieu of that exciting announcement, I offer a list of practical advice for writers submitting to markets:


Practical Advice for Writers
In Which an Editor Gets a Few Things Off His Chest

1. Read the submission guidelines. Thoroughly. I cannot stress this enough. Don't just skim them. Your editor has laid out their entire list of rules for submission, and if you don't follow them, you risk looking like an idiot. Most of the following is a derivation of this piece of advice. I repeat: read the submission guidelines.


2. Spell the editor's name right. It doesn't matter if you've gotten every other letter right, if you call me Lundbert or Lindborg, I will be less inclined to take you seriously. You wouldn't like it if your own name was misspelled, so do the editor the courtesy of proofreading their name before submitting to them.


3. Don't send your story until the reading period actually opens up. There are good reasons zines and anthologies have reading periods, such as personal things going on in the editor's life -- like vacation, graduate school, taxes, divorce, or all of the above -- and if you send your story early, it won't get read early. Either the editor will put it aside, ignore it, throw it in the wastebin, or light it on fire and do a dance around it, depending on how badly you've pissed them off.


4. When the editor says they are not accepting unsolicited reprints, don't send your unsolicited reprint and then tell the editor why it is perfect for the anthology. Most editors like to have the chance to publish new work, and if they have reprints at all, it is typically by writers they can count on to add some cachet to the project. Unless your story was originally published in a high-profile professional magazine or anthology, there's not much incentive for the editor to reprint it.


5. Similarly, in the cover letter, do not tell the editor what your story is about, and do not tell the editor why they should buy it. This will make the editor want to flush your story down the toilet, page by page, then send attack dogs after you. The editor is most likely a very bright person, and knows what they like. When you describe what happens in the story, the editor is less inclined to read the actual thing; if you can tell the story in a page, why bother spending thousands of words to tell the same story? Slight description is okay in a query letter, but only if the editor asks for it.


6. If the editor tells you they want the text of your story in Times New Roman or Courier New, do not presume that they are completely unobservant and format your fiction in Toxica instead. Any other fonts than the most basic ones are difficult to read, especially on-screen, and the editor might read 100,000 words worth of submissions. Don't give the editor any excuse to automatically reject your story.


7. Similarly, if the editor caps the word limit at 5,000 words, don't send a story at 9,000 words then explain why your story is the sole exception to this rule. Some editors will tell you to query if you have something longer than their limit; if they don't, they really don't want to look at fiction longer than their limit. This may be a practical reason, such as a budget that will only allow a certain amount of payment for each author, or it could have something to do with printing costs. Mostly, the editor is not going to want to gamble so much page space on you, unless you are an author who is recognizable; chances are you're not, and they're more likely to take something from you that is shorter.


8. If you have publication credits, only list the top four or five in your cover letter. Also, make sure that they are venues the editor might be familiar with. If not, don't list them, just say, "I have been published in several small press zines, &c." Remember the shorter your cover letter, the better. Whether your story is accepted or rejected will have nothing to do with your cover letter, and the sooner the editor can read past it and get to your actual story, the more likely he will pay attention to your submission.


9. After your story has been submitted, don't query the editor a few weeks later to make sure he got it. Chances are he did, and your impatience reveals unprofessionalism. Assume that your submission made it, and the editor is just making up his mind on whether to buy it. If you really need to know, wait until a few weeks before the end of the submission deadline; you're justified then, since if he didn't really receive it, you'll want to get it to them before he stops reading for the anthology. Plus, it shows you have a more patient attention span than a hamster.

Discuss