'cause "sufficiently" isn't country enough

[wyld_dandelyon]

Holidays over, I turned to other outstanding obligations. I had edits requested from two editors, which they wanted by the end of the year, and so I read them over and tweaked the stories.

You often read how hard it is to read editors' comments; perhaps it's the particular editors involved with these stories, or maybe it's just years of writer's workshops, but I found the process pleasant today. It's really rather cool to have someone who likes your story enough to buy it helping to make sure it's the best story it can be before hundreds of strangers see it.

Revisiting the stories also made me eager to see these two anthologies in print!

Comments

[red-trillium.livejournal.com]

Fingers crossed on the anthologies making it into print! I think you've got a good attitude towards the edits, knowing that they're helping you especially this time around.

[kelkyag]

Woohoo! Can you say which stories?

[wyld-dandelyon.livejournal.com]

I think I've talked about both before--one is Boney Fingers, in Magicking in Traffic, which will appear in e-form at first, and the other is for an anthology with a theme of subversion that I wrote with R J Astruc. The editor is sufficiently excited about the quality of those stories that he's looking to see if a larger publisher will pick up the anthology before publishing it himself, so I'm waiting to hear about the publication arrangements. It's called Scrapheap Angel.

Editors

[markiv1111.livejournal.com]

Most of the time I was comfortable working with editors and considering them to be on my side, but there had been talk of reprinting my *Weird Tales* sale, "Ghost Dance," in the local semiprozine, *Tales of the Unanticipated.* The vibe I got at this point was, "Let's see if we can force Nate to chop out 2/3 of the story, because everybody knows shorter stories are better." I tried and tried to give people a break, but no matter how I tried, I couldn't see any way that the cuts made sense, and that reprint consequently never took place. It was aggravating.

Re: Editors

[wyld-dandelyon.livejournal.com]

Bummer!

By the time you take out 2/3 of a story, it's a different story. So this experience surprises me. However, I know better than to expect every experience with any category of people to be stellar. There's always times when things don't work out, even when everyone involved means well.