Tesseracts Seventeen
Page 33
So then Brian Hades and Colleen Anderson e-mailed me up and asked me if I’d like to serve as co-editor for Tesseracts Seventeen.
Sure, I said.
It’ll be easy.
I’m typing this afterword during the last week of our editing— and we are a little behind schedule on turning around stories for TESSERACTS Seventeen— and by “we” I mean “me.” I am — I’m afraid — the weak link in our editorial team. My colleague Colleen Anderson has been the epitome of organization.
I, sadly, am the definite Yang to Colleen’s professional Yin.
(Mmm, that sounds like a good title for a movie: “The Bitter Tea of Professional Yin.”)
Let me tell you how this anthology business works.
First off the publisher sends out guidelines. He posts them on every message board, forum, Facebook page and telephone pole that he can safely hang a sheet of guidelines off of. Then the next part is easy. That’s where you writers take over and start sending us submission after submission.
Lots of submissions.
That’s when editors start sorting through the stories.
At first we set them in three piles.
Pile One is the “this doesn’t work for us,” which is either; “Oh my god I need to cut my nose off and feed it to my bulldog ‘cuz this story stinks so bad,” or, more often; “Oh my god, you sent a “haunted hat” story to an anthology built around “haunted shoe” stories.”
Pile Two is the “Maybe, baby” pile, which is where the editor will put the stories that might fit;“Okay, this guy is writing about haunted socks, which is pretty close to haunted shoes.”
Pile Three is the “If we don’t buy this story RIGHT NOW we might as well load a bulldog full of cut-off noses and haunted shoes and blow our collective editorial brains all over Pile One and Pile Two.” This is DEFINITELY the pile that you want your story to land upon— but it is DEFINITELY the shortest pile in the entire process. Editors don’t want to take that big leap right away— just because if they say YES-YES-YES to the first twenty stories that are submitted they might miss out on a truly wonderful story that comes in on the very last day of submission.
So we hold off. We play hard to get. We keep you guessing.
Only problem is we’re guessing too.
So— for the next two months the submissions keep coming.
We read until our eyes bleed.
To make it tougher on us, our publisher — Brian Hades of EDGE Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing — asked us to make certain we had stories and/or poems from EVERY FREAKING province and territory of Canada.
Ought to be easy, right?
Wrong.
See, we had about a billion submissions from Ontario, and besides those billion submissions ONE author submitted from Prince Edward Island.
(And yes, I know that a billion is a hyperbole, which is about the most worse bit of writing technique an editor might use, but I told you I wasn’t much good at this editing business about a zillion times before.)
Once we settle on a maybe pile we go through again and decide which maybe is a keeper. Then comes editing. Oh yes, there is a reason they call us editors. We each took a story and went through it ruthlessly. Colleen uses a pen. I favor a good-sized axe. We send it off to the author— who then sends it back with each ruthless edit addressed. Then each once-edited story went to the other editor who likewise blue-pencils them up and returns the manuscript.
Finally— once we’ve put together a final manuscript we send it to the publisher who reads it and okays it and sends out a galley PDF to each author for final proofing. Contracts go out. Rough layout and more final proofing. Payments— always nice. Production, marketing, distribution, more marketing, sales and yet more marketing.
Easy, huh?
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Steve Vernon is a storyteller who has been writing speculative fiction since 1986. His stories have appeared in Evolve, Evolve 2, Tesseracts Sixteen, Hot Blood XIII, The Best Of Cemetery Dance, Open Space: New Canadian Fantastic Fiction, and Karl Edward Wagner’s Year’s Best Horror Xix. His first YA novel Sinking Deeper Or My Questionable (Sometimes Heroic) Decision To Invent A Sea Monster is a touching tale of sea monsters, gumboot dragon dances and caber tossing.
Details
Tesseracts Seventeen:
Speculating Canada from Coast to Coast to Coast
Copyright © 2013
All individual contributions copyright by their respective authors.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Published by
Edge Science Fiction
and Fantasy Publishing
An Imprint of
HADES PUBLICATIONS, INC.
P.O. Box 1714,
Calgary, Alberta, T2P 2L7,
Canada
Edited by Colleen Anderson and Steve Vernon
Cover Illustration by Tomislav Tikulin
e Book ISBN: 978-1-77053-045-4
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All rights reserved. Under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
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EDGE Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing and Hades Publications, Inc. acknowledges the ongoing support of the Alberta Foundation for the Arts and the Canada Council for the Arts.
(M-20130820)
www.edgewebsite.com