Happy birthday, kiddo -- good lord, she'll be 23 now. Or maybe it's 24. Oof. We're all getting old... :-)
Well, yesterday was appallingly productive. I didn't really realize until David called around 5ish that I'd been working pretty much non-stop since I'd gotten up - 13 hours or so. I did about an hour more work after dinner, and then I went to sleep at 8 or so. I should be back on a normal schedule soon.
I'm really enjoying reading the Herotica 7 manuscripts -- they're all fabulous so far! Of course, there's a reason for that -- Marcy put all the best ones, the ones she was thinking of using, on top. :-) So soon I'll be seeing ones that aren't quite as polished as these. Right now I'm just reading good story after good story, which is very nice and quite the atypical editing experience, let me tell you. Maybe this is what it would be like to be a high-powered editor with first and second readers who screened all the stories for you...
Though that's certainly not what's going on here. Did I ever explain the setup on this anthology to you guys? I don't think so. In brief -- Herotica 7 is the multicultural Herotica anthology. Of course, they hope all their anthologies are multicultural, but they're also aware that they often aren't as diverse or representative of different experiences as they would like. So the idea is that if we do one with a solid multicultural focus, then we'll showcase a lot of great material and great authors which will hopefully encourage the publication of this sort of thing throughout the field in the future. I think it's a good idea.
So where do I come into this? Marcy Sheiner's been editing Herotica for several issues now, and doing a great job -- how come she suddenly has a consulting editor? Well, basically I'm the brown editor. No, seriously. Marcy is Jewish, but she's also white, and pretty much the whole staff of Down There Press is also white. They thought it would be a very good idea to have a brown person helping out with this book -- helping with initial publicity in non-white communities, helping check over the stories to see if I see anything problematic in what Marcy might select, or if I find a jewel that she's overlooked. Of course, I'm just one person, with my own biased viewpoint, and it would be fabulous to have a huge panel of editors, but I think that might break the Down There Press budget. So instead they picked me. I'm cheap, and I do pretty good work. Hopefully I won't be cheap for long. :-)
So I hope that explanation made sense. I think for the most part I'm going to be agreeing with Marcy, but I have seen one story already that I think is a bit iffy -- it's a good story, but I'm not sure I buy that the representations of culture are accurate, and I could easily see how they could be read as offensive. I'll need to talk about it with Marcy, and the final decision will be hers, but that's part of what I'll be checking for with these pieces.
I'll try not to talk too specifically about these stories here in the next week (I shouldn't be working on this very long), because frankly, I know it's likely that some of the people who have submitted will be reading this, hoping for tidbits. No tidbits! They will just cause you angst! I'm already sort of regretting the paragraph above, but I wanted to be sure you guys understood what I was doing.
And now I think I'm going to get back to doing it. Talk to y'all later...have a great day!