Editors and Other Things

Norwich has crazy bipolar weather: it'll be bright and sunny, but by the time I get my shoes on and am heading out the door for a walk it will be pouring down rain. Get the shoes off and crack a book, it's sunny again. Wash, rinse, repeat, until I got so sick of it I ran off to Reading for a few days, because it's sunnier there and the work can't follow me because Dave won't tell me the password to the internet.

Last week I was fussing to myself because I needed to e-mail my editor and I didn’t have sufficient brain to do so and sound intelligent. Then I stopped, realized I have an editor (four, actually), and did a little dance.

A lot of people seem to have a funny view of editors. They make all the money, make all the decisions, and do none of the work. They also seem to get a lot of the credit. “We love your story, we have to have it!” is the sort of thing they say. “Just change the father to a mother, the cat to a dog, and lose the kid with cancer.”

Maybe it’s my luck, but I love the ones I’ve had. There are a lot of pieces that I’m mostly happy with but don’t really know how to make any better, and rather than sitting on them until they’re perfect I send them somewhere I think they’ll fit, hoping for a bite. A good editor can tell me what needs to change in order to turn a piece into what I intended it to be when I began. The editor I mentioned earlier was helping me finish off “Practical Necromancy,” which, as my first crack ever at the horror/suspense genre, I didn’t feel too sure of. I knew that the story delivered in the second half, but while the first half set the scene sufficiently it didn’t have the degree of tension that I wanted, and after a month of on and off tinkering I couldn’t figure out how to create that freaked-out feeling right from the beginning. She didn’t tell me how to rewrite, but she did give me several ideas for how to up the pressure in the first few pages, and I wound up liking and using almost all of them. Once I put aside the initial feeling of “this is my story and it’s perfect how I have it!” having an editor telling me what could make it better was like having a private idea generator, except no one was going to get mad at me for stealing their material.

One of the other students on the MA worked as an editor for quite a while, and she says that their job is to stand in as the universal dumb reader. If things are not clear enough, they need to see that. If a plot point is overwritten, they need to see that, too. And they hand out ideas without an apparent thought to intellectual property.

I have said no to an editor before, despite how it might sound. A literary magazine wanted to buy “Chloe’s Story,” but only if I changed the ending. While the changes to “Practical Necromancy” were to the plot, and something I felt was objectively necessary, the changes to “Chloe’s Story” would have required changes to Chloe’s character, and I refused to do that, partly because Chloe herself has become a fully-formed person to me and I want her to stick around and turn up in something else I write later, and partly because Chloe got me into the MA program, got me into the Honors program in undergrad, and has netted about $30,000 US in scholarships and random cash awards, so if she gets published in the traditional way (which she hasn’t yet, since I haven’t really sent her anywhere that wasn’t waving stacks of cash in my face), I want it to be some place where other people will fall in love with her just as much as I have.

If you want to read them, “Practical Necromancy” will be coming out in an anthology of Women’s horror writing titled "Deep Cuts"  near the end of the year. You wouldn’t think it, but women are crazy underrepresented in contemporary horror; part of the submission required a recommendation of a female writer and a short horror story of theirs that I’d particularly liked, and it took me four hours of internet searches to find any female writers that could be billed as writing straight-up horror. In the end I wound up pushing one of my favorite childhood writers who happened to author the first creepy story I ever read. (Diana Wynne Jones, "The Master.")

“Chloe’s Story” can be found here, though hopefully she and the rest of the collection that she’s tied to will come out to play on their own one of these days; short story cycles seem to be enjoying a small surge in popularity, but I’m waiting to hear back from one or two special projects before I start shopping the collection around on the open market.