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The Time Travel Fun of Editing…
Sometimes Even I Get Confused… And I have been editing for 35 years in one way or another. Pulphouse Fiction Magazine #32 came out yesterday to subscribers in ebook. Paper and contributor paper copies will trail along as normal for anything paper. I wrote the introduction to that issue back in early June. Pulphouse is monthly now, which causes me to work out two or three months ahead. Two is minimum. So tonight I finished the introduction to the October issue that will come out right before Halloween. Here in the heat of August I have been writing about the fall weather and Trick-Or-Treating. And selecting a few stories in…
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Yes, I Am Now the Editor of Writers of the Future…
You Heard That Right… Jody Lynn Nye is the coordinating judge, so she and Kary English will work together to get the top manuscripts to all the judges each quarter. After all the judging is done, the manuscripts will go into Writers of the Future and the names will be put back on them and I will get to work with the authors and put the book together and so on. The folks at Galaxy Press and Author Services are maybe the nicest, friendliest, and most hard-working people I have ever had the pleasure to know. And working with them will be a fantastic pleasure. As I said, I was…
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A Dip Into the Past…
Looking Through the Twenty Issues of the Original Pulphouse Magazine… In the last Pulphouse Kickstater, we offered a stretch reward that we said would be coming out about now that was a sample of the stories I published back in the original Pulphouse: A Fiction Magazine. So I was putting that together tonight. I quickly came to realize a few things. The small volume I was putting together could not be a best-of volume because there are just far, far too many great stories in those twenty volumes. I needed to pick eight for this short sample of stories from back 30 years. So this would not be a best-of…
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Reading To Buy…
Editing… A Very Different Mindset… Right now I am reading Cave Creek stories for three different anthologies. I am most of the way through all the stories and will be turning the anthologies in on Monday to WMG with my introductions. A lot of work and it has been a lot of reading as well. But honestly, I have loved it, because Cave Creek is a shared world I came up with and all these great writers are writing in that world. That, by itself, is a strange feeling. Cave Creek has some pretty set rules and I need different stories to be in the book inside these set rules.…
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Needing a Reader and Copyeditor…
Fighting Myths Again… Beginning and early professional writers always seem to focus on needing to have editors and copyeditors and beta readers and everything else. Always overkill and usually, almost without exception, it also kills their writing and stories. Some background. This obsessive desire for editing and copyediting on novels comes from three places. — First, it comes from 1970s-1990s traditional publishing habits that have stuck around and passed around as needed like myths of a big tall walking snowman with a chainsaw. In other words, too stupid for reality in 2020, but still believed by those coming into the publishing profession. — Second place all this editing stuff comes…
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Reading With A Focus
I Am Very Lucky… With all this reading for the anthology workshop, I am reading as a Pulphouse Fiction Magazine editor. And wow does that make this reading easier. And sometimes more annoying. First off, let me explain why all this reading is easier for me than others. I start off reading and with most of these stories, the writers are good enough to catch me with their depth and openings. (If I was reading a real slush pile, I would reject nine out of ten because the writing didn’t catch me. Those poor openings are easy to reject, but very few of them in these manuscripts. Very, very few.)…
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Real Las Vegas Workshops Deadlines
We Give The Dates the Workshops Are Held… But that is not the deadline to sign up by any means. The workshops, for the most part, all start months and months ahead of the actual date you need to attend. For example, the Mystery Workshop here in Vegas in April is closed, not because it is full but because the reading list for it went out over a month ago and those attending need time to read. And that goes the same with those in the Study Along for the mystery workshop. We don’t close that one because someone might want to just watch the videos, but if you want…
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Reading as an Editor
I Have A Lot of Reading to Do… As does everyone else who is attending the 2019 Anthology workshop here in Las Vegas the first week of March. And even better, the stories are all written by writers who sure know what they are doing. This is not slush. This is what Kris and I used to call back in the days (early 1990s) of Pulphouse or F&SF reading, the “pro pile.” Everyone attending the workshop is reading like editors, not readers, or they should be, even though only five of us professional editors will be up front actually buying stories. But I have a real advantage in this reading.…
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We’re Going For the “How To Edit…” Workshop
FULL STEAM AHEAD… After some dithering around because of almost no initial response, we had people today tell us they wanted the How To Edit Your Own Work workshop, but were planning on taking it later. And that is enough to make us realize the workshop is worth our time in trying to help writers not kill their own work. So the workshop is a go. We will take sign-ups for any point that it is on the schedule through August and it will join the regular workshop rotation after that. Thanks for the feedback everyone. Appreciated.
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NEW ONLINE WORKSHOP: How to Edit Your Own Work
New Online Workshop Starting in May… Kris and I get the most questions, all good questions, about the process of editing your own work. And honestly, there is no easy or completely right answer for everyone. But there are hundreds of ways, one of which will be right for you. Between writing into the dark and following Heinlein’s Rules, how do you make sure your work is what you want, clean enough for readers to not notice any problems? How can you edit without the deadly rewriting that kills voice and all originality? Those are just a couple of the questions we get in one form or another, including how to…