Yesterday, Grasping for the Wind posted a review of The Pirate Issue, and now they’ve posted an interview with me:
GFTW: You were recently invited to be a guest editor for the Pirate Issue of Shimmer Magazine. What was your approach to choosing stories for this issue?
JJA: One of the things I wanted to do with the Pirate Issue is have a broad range of pirate stories, which took some liberties interpreting the term "pirate." Of course, there are some stories in the issue that are your typical iconic Caribbean-style pirate, but it was important to me to have a certain diversity represented. So that was one factor.
Other than that, I was really just judging the stories on their own merits as I would judge any story. In fact, that was the only way I could judge them, really, because Shimmer employs a "blind" reading system, in which the names of the contributors are stripped off of their manuscripts before the editor sees them. So when I read each story, all I had was the title and the text. It was kind of a liberating feeling to read each story with absolutely no preconceptions, not even subconsciously, about what I might think about the story I was about to read. (And this was only enhanced by the fact that I read all the submissions electronically, so every submission looked exactly the same to me–there were no variations in manuscript formatting or other things like that to get in the way of me engaging with the story.)
The only other time I’ve ever read a story anonymously, as far as I know, is when I read Neil Gaiman’s "How to Talk to Girls at Parties" for F&SF. The manuscript didn’t have Gaiman’s name on it, just the title. I kind of felt like I recognized the voice, but I couldn’t put my finger on who it was. After I got to the end, I saw Neil Gaiman’s name, and so I learned who wrote it. But I was glad to have read it that way, and I enjoyed reading a whole slush pile’s worth for Shimmer that way.
Click to read the whole interview.
Also, SF Signal asked me to participate in their new Mind Meld feature, in which they get a bunch of knowledgeable folks and ask them to chime in on a certain issue. So click through to read my thoughts about online book reviewing, along with thoughts from folks like David Hartwell, Niall Harrison, James Patrick Kelly, and others.
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