Currently Reading #6

[littlerdog.livejournal.com]

After some days of comfort reading, we're back to the serious stuff: The Collected Stories of Carol Emshwiller, Vol.1, put out by Nonstop Press and edited by...well, who? Because my money's on nobody.

As someone who's edited for Strange Horizons, NFG, GUD and The World SF blog, I know it's hard work and I know only too painfully well that mistakes are made, and you don't notice them until it's too late, and there is much rending and tearing of garments as a result. Also, you will be pilloried by the eagle-eyed portion of the readership, always much more eagle-eyed and vocal than you would wish.

But. Come on. If there's one thing you learn as an editor, it's you can't trust anyone's editing. Not your own, not the author's, and not that of anyone who edited something for publication before you.

In other words, it's not enough to copy&paste a story that's been previously published into your document and trust that whoever edited it did a perfect job. They won't have done. You won't, either, but you can damn well try.

Especially when you have an author who openly admits they can't spell.

Some people, having trained the editorial eye and the editorial brain, then install a convenient Off switch for those moments when they're not actually editing. Either mine never arrived from the factory or it doesn't work; in other words, even when reading for pleasure, the editorial eye and brain are functioning, noticing mistakes, infelicitious phrasings, and pretty much how the story has been written as well as what's been written in the story. If I let it. If there are mistakes to notice. If the story is not, perhaps, sufficiently gripping to lull the editorial aspect to sleep. This is one of those things they don't warn you about when you take up writing, editing, and tearing your hair out.

"Hallow" for "halo". That one's almost funny, except you have to go back and reread it to work out, yeah, must be "halo" that's meant. Then you've lost the thread of the story. Lots and lots of typos. At least one missing or misplaced line. Look, this book costs twenty-five pounds and it's only volume one. That's a lot of my money you're wanting for just a copy&paste job. The stories should have been edited, at the very LEAST they should have been proofread. It's insulting to the author and it's insulting to the reader not to bother.

Daily Science Fiction

[littlerdog.livejournal.com]

Every day, a story from Daily Science Fiction appears in my inbox. Every day, Thunderbird tags it as possibly a scam. Every day, Tbird gives me two options: Disable all warnings or Ignore this particular one. There's no halfway house. I have to be warned every day or never.

Rest assured, Daily SF is not a scam. You sign up for a free SF story every day and that's what you get.

Thunderbird is just over-enthusiastic, I guess.

The reader is invited to rate each story on a scale of 1 to 7 rocket dragons (yeah) and to leave comments. I think I did leave some ratings and comments in the early days, but so many of these authors seem to be newbies making their first professional sale that tearing their story to pieces in a place they were sure to visit eagerly and with hope in their hearts felt mean. So I stopped doing it.

The correct place to destroy an author's dreams and break their hearts is, I've always felt, the slush pile.

However. It is very tempting to write 'Why I Liked (or Didn't Like) Your Story' somewhere. Maybe somewhere the author will never know, unless they obsessively search on their own name like nobody I know. Ahem. And some of these stories are so bad that they could be asking for it, if you believed in the concept of asking for it, which our society does and I don't. Well, I try not to. But really. Sometimes they are very bad.

Different standards, different editorial tastes, subjectivity, publish the best of what you get, yada yada.

Or just bad.

It's my blog (okay, it's Monissaw's blog) so I can be as grouchy as I please.

And YES I did submit to them in the early days and YES they did reject everything I sent, including 'Snow Cat', which eventually found a home with ASIM. So you can attribute spite and envy to me as well. Eppur si muove.