Editing for anthologies and magazines is a strange game. A true editor is knowledgeable, fast, crisp and ruthless. “We regret that we cannot offer your story a place. Thanks. Goodbye.” A true editor has a single-minded vision of what they want, and a rule of iron. A dozen submissions processed with a steely glance and the press of a key.
I’m the Other Guy/Girl. I’m relatively slow and painstaking, unless confronted with clear genius; I read and re-read submissions, in case I missed something. I wonder if my original concept could be diverted slightly for a particularly fine piece of writing. I know the horrors of Being A Writer, and I shift between wanting to send interesting borderline stuff back immediately, and waiting to see if I might squeeze it in somehow (answer: send it back asap with a positive note – another market might want it). I occasionally suggest developmental rewrites, when I should say No, not enough time.
Which means that I please a small cadre of people, and probably annoy a much larger one. It makes me a Half-Blood Editor. But I have been thinking about this a lot recently, having just completed another anthology. And had I been editing fiction for twenty years or more (though I have edited an awful lot of non-fiction over the decades), I might be well placed to make some acute observations. Instead, after a few years of hacking away at it, I end up with a few idle reflections…
