Clockwork Universe - the editor's life
Jan. 14th, 2014 07:50 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pbrayPutting together an anthology is like building one of those fiendishly complicated jigsaw puzzles where they throw in extra pieces that don't quite fit. For CLOCKWORK UNIVERSE: STEAMPUNK vs ALIENS, we received far more stories than we could possibly use, and thus this past weekend Joshua drove up from Binghamton so we could work on making our (almost) final selections.
We were in agreement on which stories were our favorites, and which ones had missed the mark. The arguments were all over the stories that fell into the middle, and we agonized over the selections.
After narrowing down the list of candidates, we started thinking about the structure of the anthology. We cut out strips of paper with the titles of each story, then arranged and rearranged them until we were satisfied. We need to start and end on our strongest stories, which are generally from our anchors. In the middle we try to separate stories by theme, tone, setting, etc. A humorous story will be followed by one with a darker tone, a story set in Europe may be followed by one set in North America, a longer piece will be offset by two shorter stories. As we starting building the table of contents, stories that had been on our list of potentials started to fall off, because they didn't fit with our other selections.
Here's a picture from when we were pondering.
.
So are we ready to tell the submitting authors if they've made it in? Not quite yet. We're still waiting on one of the anchor stories. Once we have it, we'll make one more pass through the proposed lineup to make sure that everything works together, and then we'll start sending out the notifications. Then it's revisions, formatting, and finally the best part--releasing the book into the wild.
I can't wait.
We were in agreement on which stories were our favorites, and which ones had missed the mark. The arguments were all over the stories that fell into the middle, and we agonized over the selections.
After narrowing down the list of candidates, we started thinking about the structure of the anthology. We cut out strips of paper with the titles of each story, then arranged and rearranged them until we were satisfied. We need to start and end on our strongest stories, which are generally from our anchors. In the middle we try to separate stories by theme, tone, setting, etc. A humorous story will be followed by one with a darker tone, a story set in Europe may be followed by one set in North America, a longer piece will be offset by two shorter stories. As we starting building the table of contents, stories that had been on our list of potentials started to fall off, because they didn't fit with our other selections.
Here's a picture from when we were pondering.
.So are we ready to tell the submitting authors if they've made it in? Not quite yet. We're still waiting on one of the anchor stories. Once we have it, we'll make one more pass through the proposed lineup to make sure that everything works together, and then we'll start sending out the notifications. Then it's revisions, formatting, and finally the best part--releasing the book into the wild.
I can't wait.