A Sith Emperor walks into a bar

Yesterday during the day I read the last of the anthology submissions, and then last night partner-in-crime Joshua and I got together to go through all of the stories. A marathon session, those who know us will be shocked to realize that we went for over two hours before realizing we had yet to break into the chocolate.

The quote that kept coming to mind was one from Return of the Jedi ("Everything is proceeding exactly as I had foreseen") as we realized that our original estimates for average word counts, number of dropouts, etc., were right on target.

We're very happy with the stories submitted, and it's going to be a great anthology.

Interestingly we agreed on almost everything. I'd thought there would be more conflict, since our tastes in books are overlapping not identical. But we both had the same list of favorite stories, both agreed on which author had surprised us most (in a good way). There was one story that resonated more with me than with Joshua, but other than that, we were the most complementary of co-editors. If this was a Project Runway team challenge, we'd spend our time in front of the judges raving about how easy it was to work with each other.

(If this was the Amazing Race, I'd still be stuck at the top of some impossibly tall object, explaining to Joshua that "No, I'm never going to bungee jump/climb from one cable car to another/rappel down a skyscraper/etc." But I digress.)

Obviously massive amounts of work left between now and July 1st, when we turn in the final production-ready manuscript. But the same cheerful optimism that got us into this project will no doubt carry us through the remaining tasks.

And we're already planning our next collection.