Back Tomorrow With Chapter Two…
Got Too Busy Reading Tonight…
Because of all the things that happened this last fall and through the winter, I got really behind on reading the stories for Pulphouse Fiction Magazine that were sent over the fall and winter from the Pulphouse Kickstarter last summer.
But been giving every story a good chance, a good read, and finding some. I have been mixing up the topic stories through the fall, so the ones I have left are not that many in any month. One more week I should have a response to everyone who sent in a story through December.
This has been a great time reading and I am looking forward to the next few months of reading from the Series Collides Kickstarter in January. I will start into those in June.
A number of observations from an editor standpoint.
1… I have passed on a bunch of stories I am sure will sell to regular magazines or stand alone to readers indie. And I do mean a bunch. Why? Because the stories, while great, do not have a Pulphouse feel to them. And that feel does not come in the ending, it is all the way through.
So my reading experience with these kind of stories go like this… I open the story and find myself sucked right into the story. Normally in three or four pages I surface if the story is not feeling like a Pulphouse story. And even though with many of those stories, I want to read to the end, I do not. I send a letter to the author saying exactly what happened, often using the terms “faded out” and move on to the next story.
The writers submitting stories to me through the Kickstarter are almost all really good writers. That’s what is making this fun.
2… I have passed on stories that I read all the way to the end and liked, but again not a Pulphouse story. I tell the authors this as well.
3… Rarely (thankfully), I get a story that doesn’t even hook me or pull me in. Sometimes this is topic, sometimes it is the writer forgetting setting and depth. Maybe one out of ten stories. I tell the writer this as well.
So too much reading to night and now I want to get back to it.
One last thing… Thanks a ton for the support on the recent Kickstarter campaign. It finished great!!