Blog – Page 19 – John Joseph Adams

Codex Q&A: How do editors feel about serial stories/ shared worlds?

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’ve often wondered how editors feel about serial stories/shared worlds. Obviously, short stories need to stand on their own, but I’m always paranoid that editors will see a unified setting that they’ve rejected before and think, “Oh, god, not again.” I’m aware that this is probably a fairly self-centered interpretation of what goes on behind the screen, but still: Do you ever feel this way? Do you prefer seeing writers create a broader collection or stories, or do you just take each one as its own thing? Or do you rarely even notice?

I can’t speak for all editors obviously, but personally I *like* series stories. Obviously not all the time–I wouldn’t want Lightspeed to be comprised of nothing but different series stories–but I really enjoy serial story telling (which is probably why I enjoy ambitious TV like Breaking Bad and The Wire so much). A series of short stories is probably my favorite way of consuming such serial stories.

I’ve actually got a couple of series going in Lightspeed:

Carrie Vaughn’s “Aetherian Revolution” stories
Sean Williams’s “Twinmaker” stories Matthew Hughes’s “Kaslo Chronicles” stories
Marc Laidlaw’s “The Tales of Gorlen Vizenfirthe”

I actually just started “Series Archive” pages for such stories, so that it’ll be easier to find the other stories in the series if you want to read the others. If you click through those links above, that’ll take you there. The Twinmaker series only has the one story so far, so it’s not a true series yet, but the next one is coming up in August, and I have two others in inventory.

Speaking of Matthew Hughes, he’s one of the reasons I really fell in love with series short fiction. Back when I was working at F&SF, he wrote a series of stories about Henghis Hapthorn, Old Earth’s Foremost Freelance Discriminator (a Sherlock Holmes type), which were these “Dying Earth” type science-fantasy stories, in a universe where every several thousand years, the fundamental ground rules of the universe arbitrarily switch between rational cause-and-effect and “sympathetic association” (which is vulgarly known as “magic”). So I’m really excited to be able to do publish this new series by him in Lightspeed.

Obviously, though, not all series are going to work for me. There are some stories I like the first one, but then the author tries me again with another, and it doesn’t quite work for me, or maybe I just don’t necessarily want a whole series of stories in that vein, etc. It’s all a case by case basis. I have on occasion, though, encouraged authors to write more stories set in a milieu of theirs.

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Codex Q&A: When and how do you like to see a writer publicize a sale on social media?

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We’ve got a thread going now about when it’s best to publicize a sale on social media: on acceptance, on contract, on publication, some combination of all three, it depends, or never. Do you have a preference, as an editor? When and how do you like to see a writer squee about a sale?

As an editor, I don’t have any particular preference when a writer announces such things. Except, of course, ideally the author will help promote their story once it comes out, so I guess my one preference would be to AT LEAST be sure to announce it when the story is published, and to let readers know how they can find it. But whether or not they announce it before that time isn’t particularly relevant to me. I think the real trick is how to do so without annoying/making jealous all your writer colleagues. I’m not sure what the solution to that particular conundrum is, but I expect it’s really only much of an issue for folks who are particularly prolific.

But I will say that, maybe even more important to worry about is the “I’ve got good news and I can’t tell you what it is” sort of posts, as those are probably more likely to cause colleagues to start panicking that they haven’t heard the same mysterious good news and so they must be a horrible failure, etc.

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Codex Q&A: Do you have separate pools of slush readers for Lightspeed’s Fantasy and Science Fiction submissions?

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Lightspeed asks authors to determine whether a story is fantasy or science fiction. Do you have separate pools of slushers for these two categories?

I give every slush reader the option to either read both SF and Fantasy or just one or the other. The vast majority want to read both, but I can think of at least one reader who wanted to read only fantasy stories (someone I inherited from Fantasy Magazine). The only real separation of the slush teams is Lightspeed and Nightmare, though there’s a good amount of crossover between those.

Is it a problem if authors pick the ‘wrong’ category (I sometimes have stories that could arguably be either fantasy or sf)?

No, not a problem at all. It’s not even a problem if you submit it to the “wrong” magazine (i.e., Lightspeed instead of Nightmare). I instruct the slush readers to just evaluate the stories on their own merits, regardless of that kind of stuff. So they might make a note in their comments that the story didn’t really feel like SF but it’s definitely genre, and they liked it, so they say I should look at it and decide for myself.

Personally I don’t really care much about the genre distinctions, or even enforcing them rigidly…but Lightspeed‘s format is such that we have a number of slots (rather than a word count) to fill every month, so I do have to decide whether a story feels more like SF or feels more like fantasy for that purpose. And the thing is, some readers DO care about the distinction–some only like SF or really only like Fantasy, so I want to make the magazine as welcoming to them as possible as well, and thus I like the “slot” system since that means no issue will be 90% fantasy or something and thus disappoint the SF-only reader.

I’ve got one in inventory right now that the author submitted as SF but it felt like fantasy to me; however, it’s a trope that HAS been treated as SF in the past. I actually thought about taking this particular story for Nightmare too, so it was one of those that just could be called SF, fantasy, or horror (or maybe all three?). Stories like that are tricky to place. Ultimately, for that one, between SF and fantasy (eliminating horror from the equation since I bought it for Lightspeed), I’ll probably slot it in wherever I’ve got less inventory when it comes time to schedule the story.

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Codex Q&A: What’s your advice for slush readers?

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What’s your advice for slush readers? Do you have recommendations for how I can avoid brain damage or avoid killing my soul, or is it already too late? Recommendations to avoid burnout? Time-management techniques? Do you have a spiel you give your new slush readers? Do you just assume they’ll burn out eventually and quit?

Well, I read slush at F&SF for nearly nine years, and I seem to have escaped without brain damage (mostly). For my Lightspeed slush readers, I think there’s less likelihood of burnout just because I use a larger team, so there’s less slush you have to tackle every day. When I was at F&SF–for most of my time there–I was the only person reading the slush, so I had to deal with all of it.

I don’t have much advice for avoiding burnout. I don’t think there’s really anything you can say or do; you’re either going to get sick of it or you’re not. I will say, though, that if you find yourself getting sick of it, you should probably do the right thing and quit, since it’s not really fair to the writers whose stories you’re reading if you’re burned out.

FWIW, I think reading slush is absolutely the best thing you can do to grow as a writer, at least when you’re still learning. (I don’t know that it would help established writers much.) Forcing yourself to read like an editor can really change the way you think about stories, and can change the way you start writing them. Most of the things you’ll learn won’t be conscious, concrete lessons; instead, it’ll be more like learning by osmosis.

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***Codex Q&A: Could you elaborate on what you mean by “commercial” and “literary”?

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We can’t possibly let you escape without elaborating on what you mean by “commercial” and “literary”, you know.

Hmm…not sure how to break those down any. I suppose you could substitute “commercial” with “accessible” and “literary” with “critically-acclaimed” or something like that. Does that clarify at all?

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Codex Q&A: What aspects of stories do you find easiest to fix?

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Are there aspects of stories that you find easy to fix? Clearly, an amazing story arc with grammatical errors is worth accepting as it will take no time to fix it up. But what types of problems are worth a rewrite request as opposed to just moving on?

I think for me, it’s usually something character related. Like the plot and world building is there, and grabbed me, but then there’s something about the character that doesn’t quite work, but I really liked the other elements and so it seems like something that can be saved. I’m not sure how often that’s the case, though; it’s pretty hard to generalize about something like that.

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Codex Q&A: What do you think it means for fiction to be accessible?

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What do you think it means for fiction to be accessible, though that’s probably not an easy question to answer.

Mostly I ask myself: Do you need the equivalent of a Master’s Degree in Science Fiction Studies to understand the story? If so, then it’s not particularly accessible. It might be brilliant to those steeped in genre literature, but newcomers to the SF/F sphere will bounce off it, hard.

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Codex Q&A: How do you decided if anthology topics are marketable or too “niche”?

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In deciding on themes or central concepts for anthologies, have you ever had an idea that you really loved but set aside because you felt it was too “niche” to be successful? How do you decide what topics are more marketable versus which ones might just appeal to too narrow an audience to be worth the effort?

Oh, I’ve definitely come up with ideas that I would love to do but they seemed too niche. Could be that Kickstarter will pave the way for that since you can sort of test the waters to see if it’s worth doing. If it IS too niche it probably won’t fund, and there you go.

As for how I decide, I mostly just study the market and talk to my agent about it. It’s more of a going with your gut sort of thing, though there is some studying of sales numbers and trends.

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Codex Q&A: How would you characterize Lightspeed’s readership?

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How would you characterize Lightspeed‘s readership (beyond the demographics on the advertising page)? How would you say they differ, on average, from the readers of other genre magazines? Do there seem to be definite clusters of taste among the readership – distinct groups of SF-centric and fantasy-centric readers, perhaps, or of literary and non-literary stories?

I don’t really know how to answer this question, I’m afraid! One of the reasons did a reader survey in the first place–and am now doing one again–is to get to know the readership a little better, but those kinds of comparisons you’re asking about…I’m not even sure how one could figure that out. I am kind of curious what our readers would say is the magazine that is most like Lightspeed. That would have been a good survey question.

In the current one, I did ask people what their favorite SF/F fiction magazine was, though, so that may give me some idea. I think the numbers are so spread out as to be statistically insignificant, but if these are accurate, Lightspeed readers are most likely to enjoy the following magazines in the following order of preference:

Clarkesworld
Tor.com
Asimov’s
F&SF
Beneath Ceaseless Skies
Analog

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Codex Q&A: How do you select reprints for Lightspeed?

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How do you select reprints for Lightspeed? Do you avoid reprints that are already available online? Is an older story better than a newer story?

I do typically avoid reprints that are already online, though it depends where it is online and how recently it was posted, as I have made some exceptions. Sometimes, if it’s just on an author’s website, I’ll ask them if they wouldn’t mind taking it down, and then just linking to Lightspeed instead. Or else I’ll look for something else by that author if I feel like the story in question has had too much online exposure.

Earlier this year, I brought on Rich Horton, editor of the Prime Books Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy series, to help me hunt down reprints. So he generally pokes around on his own and also responds to various requests from me, like if I need more fantasy reprints (or SF as the case may be), or I need more reprints by women, etc.

Older is not necessarily better than newer, but the age of a story is often a factor, as it where it appeared. For instance, I’m not terribly likely to reprint something that appeared in F&SF this year or last year (except maybe under special circumstances), but I’d definitely reprint something from this year or last year that appeared in an anthology.

I’ve actually often run “near-simultaneous reprints” of stories from new anthologies on a number of occasions. (One–“Golden Apples” by Sophia McDougall–just went up this week, in fact.) I really like those, because my Lightspeed readers get a “reprint” story that is as “fresh” as an original, and the anthology gets a little extra exposure out of the deal, so it’s a win-win. (And of course the author gets a little extra money!)

Other factors:

Notability of the writer is a factor, because well-known/established writers help draw people to the magazine, and having them on board as reprints frees me up to publish more original stories by writers who are unknown or still up and coming.

Rare/obscure stories are nice because, like with the near-simul reprints, the chances my readers have read the stories already are slim.

Otherwise, of course, we’re just looking for good stories.

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