In July 2013, I served as the “editor-in-residence” for the Codex Writing Group, which meant basically I was asking a month-long AMA (“Ask Me Anything”) interview. With Codex’s permission, I’m re-posting the Q&As here on my blog. The questions were all provided by members of Codex.

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I’d like to hear a bit about your acceptance-revision process. Do you purchase perfection or close-to-perfection, and what kind of time do you spend helping the story ascend to its next level of existence?

More often than not, I purchase stories that are ready, as-is, for publication. I will only buy a story if I’d be comfortable running it 100% as it was submitted. Of course I will make editorial suggestions along the way, but they will all be optional if I liked it enough to buy it. If I liked a story but had some edits I thought were critical, I would ask for a rewrite first, and ensure that the critical issue I perceived was corrected before accepting the story.

There are some cases where I do end up making editorial suggestions that are more complicated [for example] after accepting a story, but even in that case I would have been fine running it as it originally appeared; it’s just that when I started editing it, I thought I saw a way to make it better, so I suggested it. Other times I put authors through pretty drastic rewrites before accepting the story. But both cases are exceedingly rare. There’s so much good stuff being written these days that, in most cases, if something’s not quite there, it makes sense to just pass on it and look for something else. It’s usually only when there’s something I really love but is maybe a bit broken that I spend that kind of time and energy on a story.

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Jake Kerr: Above John highlights my Lightspeed story “Requiem in the Key of Prose” as intense edits after purchase. There was actually a lot of back and forth during the rewrite and resubmit process. In other words, until it was right, John didn’t buy it. 

Ah, you’re totally right! I forgot about that. Well, it’s a good case study to show to what extent I’ll work with an author to help get a story right. :)

Kerr: I honestly can’t remember, but I do think we did some after purchase edits on “Biographical Fragments,” mostly in regards to that one interview section and the placement of a couple of sections for narrative effect.

Yeah, we did some editing on that one but I’m pretty sure it was after I bought it.

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