Edited by, p.64
Edited By, page 64
ED: Little, Brown and Company had a New York office and they called me in for an interview as sales secretary, and I was hired. The reason I was hired was because the person who had been sales secretary had been promoted to full time slush reader. Amazing, right? I worked for several months in that job and there were all these people who went on to prominent careers. They were hot shit then, but they became hotter shit.
Nine months in, someone suggested I apply for an opening in editorial at an imprint called Charterhouse. There was a clique of powerful publishing women in the ’80s and I was helped to get a job through that. Unfortunately, the imprint was dying. I don’t think the person who hired me knew. It only lasted a few months.
GB: Where’d you go from there?
ED: The first long-term job I had in publishing was at Holt, Rinehart, and Winston and I was able to take a publishing course through that. Initially, (before getting to HRW) I didn’t actually know what editing was. At one time I worked for a well-known monster. I worked for him for six months when I was desperate for a job. I edited a novel there, and I did some publicity, because it was such a small office. It was unhealthy. He was horrible. Twice a year, the building manager would get complaints from neighboring offices that they couldn’t work because of his screaming. I was one of the few people who actually resigned—gave two weeks notice—instead of quitting.
I didn’t know what I was going to do but within a couple of weeks I became an editorial assistant at Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, which was very Ivy League. I resigned after three years because I wasn’t getting anywhere. Then, I was hired at Crown to be assistant editor. The Editor-in-Chief I worked for was passive aggressively horrible and fired me after a few months of mutual misery and he got kicked upstairs. I asked his replacement if I could stay, but because she was just hired she said that politically she couldn’t do it. The next job I got was at Omni.
GB: How did you end up there?
ED: What happened is that while I was at Holt, I’d started doing some freelance reading for the Science Fiction Book, the Book of the Month Club, Dell and Ace Books, and even Twentieth Century Fox. The Executive Editor at Holt, Don Hutter, who was publishing Robert Sheckley and reprinting J.G. Ballard in the US, had a non-fiction author who had just been hired as Editor of this new magazine named Omni. After I was fired from Crown, Don knew I was looking for a job. He said, ‘Why don’t you talk to the Omni people?’ So I went in and talked to them, but they had no openings. Ben Bova was the fiction editor at the time. There was someone before him, but only for a week or two. He was essentially the fiction editor at Omni from close to the beginning. He had a secretary and not an assistant, and the secretary didn’t read or know anything about SF.
So I talked to Ben and he said there were no openings. I had temporary work over the summer, but I would haunt him and the Editor, calling them every few weeks. Finally, Ben said he was going to the Brighton World Con in ’79 and I was going to California for a few weeks. I was going to get home a week before he would. I told him I would read his slush—and he didn’t know me from a hole in the wall, other than that I was an avid reader and I wanted to work for him—so I told him I could read his whole slush pile, which was three feet tall, before he got back. First he said no, but then he called back and said okay. I honestly don’t know what possessed him to hire me.
GB: He probably just had this glorious vision of no slush pile!
ED: Yup (laughing). I did it, and he got back, and he was happy. For all I know, I rejected things I shouldnt’ve but I’d never read a magazine slush pile before. He said, ‘Okay, hang around and you can help out.’ So…everyone else at Omni is doing nonfiction, and here I am wandering around this very small office offering to do…anything. What I think Ben knew was that he was going to be promoted to Editor of the magazine. They brought in Bob Sheckley who had no office experience as far as I could tell. He had a huge expense account and only had to come in three days a week. It was like the blind leading the blind. Neither of us knew what the hierarchy was in magazine editing. I read all the manuscripts, whether they were agented or not, well known or not. I didn’t know I wasn’t supposed to. I read everything and handed a story to him or not.
I basically learned on the job. When Ben hired me I told him I wanted the title of Associate Fiction Editor because I’d already been in publishing several years. Bob and I worked together for about a year and a half. Part of the reason Sheckley got the job was because he was blocked as writer. He eventually got past that block, and asked Ben for two months off during the summer to write and he did. I was acting fiction editor during that period. He requested another month, Ben said no, and Bob left.
Omni was owned by Penthouse and for the first few years they were really struggling for respectability. Ben had been the respected editor of Analog, bringing that prestige to Omni. Ben and then Bob only worked for three days a week. Omni started publishing October 1978. When they hired Bob, he was a relatively well-known writer. After he left, I told Ben I’ll work five days a week and we’ve already gained enough respectability so the Fiction Editor no longer has to be a well-known writer.’ So Ben (and the Gucciones) said we’ll see. Finally, I was made fiction editor.
GB: So what happened when you became editor?
ED: When I took over, the first story I wanted to buy was “Petra” by Greg Bear, about gargoyles coming to life, a really weird horror story. I think I somehow justified it as weird science fiction, I don’t remember. At first, Ben had to approve all my acquisitions. Ben initially didn’t like “Petra,” but I somehow persuaded him to let me buy it anyway. The next one was Dan Simmons’ “Eyes I Dare Not Meet in Dreams,” which later was expanded into a novel. Again, Ben didn’t like that, but I said, ‘I’ll get him to rewrite it,’ which I did, and Ben let me buy it.
When I started as Fiction Editor I was told that I couldn’t buy horror. So I couldn’t buy “The Monkey Treatment” by George RR Martin or “Down Among the Dead Men” by Gardner Dozois and Jack Dann, a novelette about a vampire in the concentration camp. There were also wonderful downbeat, utterly depressing stories by Gardner solo (“Dinner Party”—turned down) and one with Jay (Jack C.) Haldeman—that I bought (“Executive Clemency”)—but Ben was not a fan of all this downbeat stuff.
Eventually I remember talking to Dick Teresi, a non-fiction editor at Omni who I considered a friend. I told him I was really frustrated that I couldn’t buy what I want, and he said, ‘Just take the power.’ And I said, ‘What do you mean?’ He said, ‘Don’t show him the contracts.’ I said, ‘What?’ He said, ‘Just take the power.’ Ooookay. It was such a weird thing to say. What I think was happening—and obviously Dick knew this—was that Ben was on his way out and Dick was being made the Editor. We never had a top editor who lasted more than two or three years at most because they were either fired or walked out.
Dick took over and he knew nothing about science fiction. He pretty much would let me buy whatever I wanted. Initially I was very nervous about it. There are stories that I didn’t take.
But stories I loved that I rejected for Omni, I often used for reprint anthologies like the year’s bests, or for half origin/half reprint anthologies like Alien Sex and Blood Is Not Enough. “All My Darling Daughters,” “Down Among the Dead Men,” are good examples.
GB: What was your first anthology?
ED: My very first were the reprint anthologies consisting of Omni stories. My first original one was Blood Is Not Enough. The way that happened is when I was at Omni, I was friendly with this guy who worked at Penthouse, an editor there, and he aproached me and said, ‘I may have a deal with a book publisher to do a series of science fiction, fantasy, and horror anthologies. Can you come up with some themes and you could edit for them?’ So I came up with four or five themes. One was alien sex, about gender relations. One about vampires/vampirism, one dubbed monkey tales, because there were a lot of stories about monkeys that I turned down and a few I’d taken. And a couple of other ideas. But the deal didn’t happen. Agent Merrilee Heiffetz was a friend, and suggested that she take me on as a client and try to sell them to publishers.
Blood Is Not Enough sold to David Hartwell at William Morrow. What I did to show proof of concept was give him several already published stories on the theme that I loved, so he’d have an idea of what I wanted to do. For the vampirism anthology, I immediately thought of the Dozois/Dann story I had to turn down for Omni: “Down Among the Dead Men,” and others that just weren’t approrpiate for Omni but that I liked. I decided I’d publish half reprints and half originals, so that’s what I actually did. The same thing with Alien Sex.
Originally, I thought it would be a conflict with Omni to edit a straight science fiction anthology-which is why I started with horror and with stories about sexuality that I couldn’t publish in Omni. Initially Omni was publishing four or five stories a month but later on the amount became fewer and fewer, until it was only one or two- because of the mix of advertising. I wanted to edit more. No one cared that I was doing this other work. No one questioned it.
So that’s how I got into creating anthologies: I wanted to do more editing.
GB: What makes for a successful anthology in your view?
ED: It depends on what you mean by successful!
First of all, trying to find a theme that is general enough—broad enough—so you can acquire stories that push against the boundaries. I especially appreciate stories that push the limit of the theme without crashing through it. If I can justify a story going into an anthology to myself, I figure that’s fine.
I try to avoid narrow themes. If I could publish all non-themed anthologies, I would, but they’re much harder to sell. I understand that, because there’s nothing for people to hang onto. The reader doesn’t know what they’re going to get. So it’s always difficult for the publisher to sell such an anthology. I find that readers say they want them, but not enough buy them to make them profitable. I’d love to edit more non-themed anthologies. It hasn’t anything to do with quality.
Terri Windling and I co-edited Salon Fantastique, an anthology of all original fantasy stories, for instance, and it didn’t sell well. It might have been the cover. It might have been the fact that the publishing imprint was dissolved around the publication date. But you don’t know. You have no idea why one book does well and another doesn’t. If anyone knew why books were bestsellers… You might think a big author will ensure an anthology sells like hotcakes—someone like Neil Gaiman—but it doesn’t. Terri and I co-edited a YA vampire anthology—Teeth and it sold okay, but considering our advance, the sales were not good enough. Naked City, my urban fantasy anthology, is another book that sold a lot of copies, but not enough considering the advance.
GB: What was putting this book together like?
ED: What was interesting—and fun—putting together Edited By is that I had to look over all of my anthologies. I remembered most of the stories. But doing this made me realize which anthologies have the most stories that I really like. Supernatural Noir is one of my favorites. I took Laird Barron’s story, which I love. But I could’ve easily taken five different stories from that book. Inferno, an un-themed horror anthology is another like that. I tried not to take more than one story from any one anthology.
I couldn’t get all the contributors I wanted to include into the book. There just wasn’t enough room for everyone.
Some decisions weren’t difficult, but others were very hard. I didn’t want to repeat stories from other recent reprint anthologies of mine. You don’t want to edit the same book over and over.
ISFDB is great because I can see how many times stories have been reprinted and where. There were a couple I wasn’t sure about that have been reprinted a lot, and ended up not taking. But then there’s something like the Garth Nix that I took anyway.
Other things I had to consider: How long since a story was reprinted and, of course, the word count of each story. I had a specific amount of space. Did I take my favorite stories by some people? No, because they might have been overused or they were too long. Lucius Shepherd’s best stories are very long and many of my favorites I published in magazines or webzine, not anthologies. It was a juggling act. It always is with a reprint anthology.
GB: What makes a short story exceptional?
ED: Oh boy.
GB: Sorry.
ED: It’s hitting everything. It’s hitting on every cylinder. It’s a combination. The perfect storm of elements. The plot may be interesting, the characters are intersting, the tone, the writing might be really great but it doesn’t have to be. I love beautiful writing, but it’s not necessary to all great stories. But the writing has to be at least competent. You have to at least not notice it, and if you do notice it then it must be beautiful. So…either I don’t want to notice the writing at all, or I want to notice it in the “Oh my god, what a great sentence” kind of way.
You don’t want it to interfere with the telling of the story. That’s also an issue with some writers who are wonderful line by line writers. It depends on the story. If it’s a novella or a leisurely told story, you can let beautiful writing distract a little bit. It’s a combination of all the elements that make up a story. I’m always looking for what’s new within the story. It might be the setting. There are only limited themes, so that’s not important—it’s how the story is told. It’s always how the story is told. From what point of view, what time and place, the tone, the characters.
What I consider a great story may not be what someone else considers a great story. Some people find what I buy boring. Amazon reviews may say something isn’t horror and I just have to say, ‘I say it’s horror and I don’t care what you say. I’m sorry you didn’t like the book, but fuck you.’
Any time an editor publishes a writer a lot, it means that editor likes their writing. We have writers who we know will write fabulous stories each year. We publish so many writers, and we don’t want the same people in every anthology and I couldn’t fit them anyway. I have to pick and choose.
GB: How do you look for new writers?
ED: I read so much for the Year’s Best and I don’t read only horror for it. I have an eye out for new writers whose work I like. If I like it a lot, I’ll solicit them to write a story. Sometimes I solicit and the story doesn’t work for me. It’s heartbreaking for me (but hopefully not for them) when that happens, because I worry they’ll never send me anything again. But when you’re working with professionals, they don’t take rejection personally.
GB: It feels like short fiction in the field is in a robust place right now.
ED: Yes. Absolutely. I have to say I don’t think a lot of what is being called science fiction today is science fiction. I’ve always liked the term speculative fiction. It’s useful for the type of fiction that isn’t quite fantasy but deals more with current concerns. Fewer writers are writing what I consider to be science fiction, that is, fiction set in the future (near or far) and extrapolating from current scientific ideas (soft or hard). Science fiction is hard to write-much of it requires research that many writers have no interest in pursuing.
GB: What trends in short fiction are you seeing?
ED: First of all, the influx of non-US-based voices. I’ve published a lot of Canadians, Australian, and UK writers, and I don’t think the US used to do that. So that’s one thing that started happening, 15-20 years ago. Then in the last five years, there are even more voices-from China, Japan, India, Pakistan, Malaysia, Mexico. Not such a Western-centric point of view.
An explosion of new voices. It’s great. This influences what everyone is doing.
GB: Thanks so much for talking to me, Ellen.
About the Contributors
Nathan Ballingrud is the author of North American Lake Monsters, The Visible Filth, and the forthcoming The Atlas of Hell. Several of his stories are in development for film and TV. He has twice won the Shirley Jackson Award. He lives somewhere in the mountains of North Carolina.
Laird Barron spent his early years in Alaska. He is the author of several books, including The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All, and Swift to Chase, and Blood Standard. His work has also appeared in many magazines and anthologies. Barron currently resides in the Rondout Valley writing stories about the evil that men do.
Elizabeth Bear was born on the same day as Frodo and Bilbo Baggins, but in a different year. She is the Hugo, Sturgeon, Locus, and Campbell Award winning author of 30 novels and over a hundred short stories. Her most recent novels are Ancestral Night and The Red-Stained Wing.
Richard Bowes has, over the last thirty-five years, published six novels, four short story collections, and eighty-plus stories. He has won two World Fantasy Awards, and the Lambda, Million Writers and International Horror Guild awards for his work.
Pat Cadigan has won the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Hugo Award, and the Seiun Award, and is hoping to live long enough to see this book come out. It’s not a sure thing but she thinks it would be foolish to bet against her.
Ted Chiang is the author of the collections Stories of Your Life and Others and Exhalation, and has won four Hugo, four Nebula, and four Locus awards. His work has been translated into twenty-one languages. He was born in Port Jefferson, New York, and currently lives near Seattle, Washington.
Carol Emshwiller grew up in Michigan and in France and for many years divided her time between New York and California. Her stories appeared in literary and science fiction magazines for over forty years, and published in a number of critically acclaimed collections including The Collected Stories of Carol Emshwiller and In Time Of War & Master Of the Road To Nowhere. Carol’s work has been honored with two Nebula Awards and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the World Fantasy Convention. She was also the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts grant and two literary grants from New York state. She died in 2019.
