EDITORIAL: August 2010 Issue

Backstage Passes

By Douglas Cohen

A few years back, while reading one of the back issues to Realms of Fantasy, I noticed that the editorial had been written by Rebecca McCabe. At the time this issue was published, editorials were still appearing in the physical magazine, and Shawna McCarthy, the magazine’s longtime and founding editor, had written almost all of them. So when someone else penned an editorial, I couldn’t help but notice. What made this even more noteworthy was Rebecca McCabe had been the magazine’s original assistant editor, the same position I held when I discovered this intriguing development. Surely, if one assistant had been allowed to write the editorial, so too could another.

The problem was the magazine’s editorials had been discontinued some years back. But not being one for letting details stand in the way, I dropped Shawna an email, wondering if at some point in the future, if by some miracle the editorial column should pull a phoenix and rise from its ashes, perhaps I too might be allowed to write an editorial, please oh please? Shawna’s response was all I could realistically hope for, this being the editorial section had been gone for a while, there were no plans to bring it back, but if anything should ever change she’ll keep me in mind.

With the exception of Shawna writing an editorial in the August 2009 issue to mark Realms of Fantasy’s return from its short-lived grave after it was cancelled earlier that year, the whole matter of editorials never really came up again …until we started developing the new website. I suggested to Shawna that she renew writing her editorials and we post them on the website. She proved agreeable to the idea, and I suspect she remembered the plea of a certain assistant editor some years back, because she also offhandedly mentioned how I could write some editorials too if I wanted to.

Obviously I did, and was quick to say as much. And then, for a while, I said nothing else. Finally I was going to write an editorial, my first editorial …but what would I write about? I had some ideas, but this would be my first editorial, and you only get to write one first editorial.

Choose wisely, young traveler.

Then, one night, a particularly busy and overwhelming night with the magazine as I juggled various matters for fiction, nonfiction, artwork, the website, and the managing editorial department, the answer hit me. I knew what my first editorial would be.

Have you ever wondered how an issue of Realms of Fantasy comes to be? The stories, artwork, articles, ads—how does it all come together six times a year and find its way to the newsstands and your mailbox? Two years I couldn’t have told you. One year ago I was still learning the answer through firsthand experience. Today, I can walk you through a good deal of this process.

Realms may be a bimonthly publication, but it takes a lot more preparation than the month between issues to get each issue ready to go to press. As a starting point, let’s begin with a very identifiable area for most people familiar with the magazine: the fiction! Realms of Fantasy accepts submissions the old-fashioned way, i.e. through the mail. We only print fantasy stories, and Shawna’s P.O. Box receives submissions in this vein from professionals and “newbies” and everything in between. When enough submissions accrue, Shawna and I meet (we each work out of our homes for the magazine) to do what is called a slush transfer. Slush, for those unfamiliar with it, is a term used for general fiction submissions. In the slush, we hope to find new and emerging writers, and if their work is good enough we’ll publish their stories alongside those from more experienced writers.

So at these slush transfers, Shawna will pass along everything that has built up since the last time we saw each other, while I will pass along all that is left from the last batch she gave me. This includes automatic passes—stories that automatically kick upstairs to Shawna due to the writing credits of the author—as well as stories I pluck from the slush. These slush stories are ones I feel Shawna should take a look at, because she might want to use them for the magazine. As with the automatic passes, sometimes she takes them, sometimes not.

Organizing the slush is a task unto itself. Imagine anywhere from 3-5 mail bins overflowing with manila envelopes, each envelope stuffed with the fantastical dreaming of another writer. This is what I’m faced with each time I organize the slush, which usually consists of anywhere from 200-300 submissions.

It’s pure chaos until I organize it. Organization starts with ordering the submissions by date. Along the way, if I come across any automatic passes, I set them aside. When everything has been organized, I do a count. Knowing how many submissions I’m dealing with gives me an idea at what pace I need to operate to keep from falling behind with the fiction.

After this, I email the automatic passes, letting them know their submissions have been safely received, and giving them a general estimate as to when their stories will be passed along to Shawna. I keep a number of logs to track the submissions we must deal with, because editors always receive queries from writers, wondering about the status of their stories. Without these logs, given how we handle submissions, it would be quite impossible to answer these queries.

After the organizational matters are wrapped up, it’s mostly a matter of reading for me. If I like it enough, I set it aside for Shawna and scribble my thoughts. As with the automatic passes, I make it a point to contact anyone I pluck from the slush, letting them know I’m passing their manuscripts along for further consideration. If I don’t like a manuscript for whatever reason, I use the SASE provided by the author to send a form rejection. Realms of Fantasy has something of an infamous form letter, a blue slip of paper the speculative community has nicknamed the Blue Form of Death (or BFOD). We also have what has been dubbed as the Yellow Form of Promise (or YFOP), which I or Shawna will send out if we believe the author’s work shows promise.

After I’m done with the general submissions, I read the automatic passes, and I’ll scribble my thoughts down for these as well, with the hopes I manage a few nuggets of wisdom that Shawna finds useful. Along with the manuscripts I’m passing along, I include a couple of documents that essentially provide a rundown of the entire batch I’ve just wrapped up. Then Shawna and I will conduct the slush transfer I mentioned, and I get to repeat the whole process with a fresh batch.

As for Shawna …

She takes the batch home and deep in her editorial fortress she works her magic, reading through the remaining manuscripts, picking out the stories she deems the best fit for the magazine. When she and Warren Lapine (our publisher) are ready to add more stories to our inventory, Shawna will do a buying run, informing me and Warren which stories she’s taking in her buying letter, along with other pertinent information, including what we’ll be paying for each story, contact information for the authors, story word counts, and of course, the editorial tag lines that accompany each story. Then she sends out a second email, informing the authors of the good news, and instructing them to email me copies of their manuscripts, bios, and web addresses if they’d like to be listed on our website’s blog roll.

From here, I fill out contracts for the authors and mail them off. I also log in various files all of the information Shawna has passed along, as it will become useful later on, and I’ve learned it’s a good thing to have this information on hand in their own separate files. Following this, assuming Shawna has taken more than four stories in her buying run, she’ll let me know which four she’d like me to send out on assignment first to receive artwork. Four stories out at a time is the amount our publisher has deemed best in terms of handing out art assignments. The following month, I usually send out the remaining stories on assignment.

This of course brings us to the artwork, but you’ll have to wait until next issue’s editorial to learn about that!

Tagged as: Editorial