By Nick Mamatas
I don’t typically swing an axe around my apartment while editing an anthology, but this time, I did. For my latest, 120 Murders: Dark Fiction Inspired by the Alternative Era, one of my favorite writers sent me a thematically appropriate and well-observed story, but also included an axe fight. I wasn’t sure about the choreography, so I borrowed the hatchet that my landlord keeps in the laundry room and gave it a whirl. I was pantomiming solo rather than in a death struggle with another person, but after a few sweaty minutes, I had my notes. The axe would need to be hung at the rear of the apartment, not by the door; the attacker would need more room and an uncontested grip on the handle to get a good swing. Easy fix! I love good writers.
Then there was the time I felt the need to call the animal services department of a neighboring city and ask if they could give me an estimate of the number of raccoons in town. What I didn’t ask was the specific question that needed answering: Are there enough raccoons for someone to kill a Hefty bag full of them every night and also not get caught by the police when dumping them around this particular neighborhood? Anyway, the answer was not enough. “Let’s ratchet it down to a bag of raccoon corpses every week or so,” I said.
Not every edit requires research. I got an excellent and very dark story with an ending that didn’t quite fit. Do you know how virtually every bit of popular fiction these days ends with the formation of a found family? Think Aliens, the dénouement of which features Ripley, Hicks, and Newt flying away from the carnage—a new mama, papa, and baby. Well, sometimes you just need to Alien 3 [MOU1] a story. Kill, kill, kill the found family; the sooner the better! I recommended cutting the entire coda so the story would end with a nice punch to the reader’s teeth. This is dark fiction, after all. Easy peasy. At the same time, economy is valuable. This is dark short fiction: does the protagonist of one of the other stories really need an abusive father and an abusive stepfather that only exist in flashback? Just smush ’em together and get on with it!
For the most part, writers are happy to receive edits and to have conversations about improving stories. One contributor even thanked me by sending me a piece of original art, an avant-garde digital photo collage. It included images from explicit man/man porn. I appreciated the gesture, though I did not email the file to my local CVS for printing and framing. (I’m looking at it now, though, as I write these words. It’s very cool, but I am not asking you, Dear Reader, to email me art.)
Sometimes, I must let stories go. One author submitted a beautiful, gripping vignette that just happened to have a bit of ambiguity in a sentence that could have been as crystal clear as the rest of the story…but had the sentence been less ambiguous, might it have pointed to the possibility of a teensy-weensy real-life crime. Fine! Send something else. I like to think I’m a good anthologist, but I don’t pay bail-money rates.
So, you see there is more to editing an anthology than picking “good stories.” Sadly, small press anthologists often see their role as limited to getting a few of their buddies together, augmenting the table of contents with whichever of their famous writer Facebook friends actually look at their Messenger messages, and calling it a day. If you accept trunk stories from prominent authors, you can slap together an anthology in a month. Then all you need do is either a crowdfunding campaign or to trip and fall in a grocery store parking lot and shout, “Ow! This isn’t my fault!” rather than “Oops, my bad!” and wait for the settlement check to clear.
Then there are some big press anthologists, ones I call “temperature-takers.” They let awards ballots and online buzz make their editorial decisions, and suddenly, this or that new short-story writer is everywhere you turn…until they release that first novel. If the novel is mediocre, the writer’s career cools off, and the temperature-takers never use them again. (Don’t believe me? Go find an anthology from 2004 or even 2014, look at the table of contents, and tell me how many times you ask yourself, “Where are they now?”) Of course, if the novel is good or at least successful, then the writer simply becomes unaffordable. Why write a short story for $500 if you can spend the same time writing a one-twentieth of a novel for an advance of $100,000?
My own strategy is to solicit writers of all sorts and levels, with an eye toward always including someone who has published fewer than five stories and with a hand reaching out to at least one writer who has been “forgotten” by the industry for whatever reason. I am also open to queries which surprises new writers and comforts more experienced ones. In decades past, every anthologist would at least entertain a query. There were giants in those days.
These days, have basic business correspondence skills been forgotten? Has the move toward submission software, highly limited submission windows, multiple layers of submissions-readers, and other attempts at a dubious fairness created a new generation of anthologists who believe that a query is an imposition? I hope not. Queries are good. Writers should master the skill; editors should read query letters closely.
Impositions do abound—I received a handful of queries and just as many public requests/demands to know if and when I’d be opening 120 Murders to submissions. This is shocking. Is there another field in which people are told that they should quintuple their workloads for no extra pay just because? Truly, if you have the nerve to tweet at an editor that they must open to submissions, you must also have the courage to write them privately and pitch your idea. It doesn’t matter how “big” or “small” you are; I’ll read your query. Best bet: query with something specific, rather than a general expression of interest or an amateurish “pretty please”.
It’s a folk belief that anthologies need stories by “big names” to sell, but that hasn’t been the case for at least fifteen years. We are in, or just leaving, a bit of a golden age for the anthology. Stores and amazon.com have figured out how to sell themed anthologies back around the time John Joseph Adams published The Living Dead—sell them as though they’re non-fiction. If someone walks into a store and asks, “Got anything about zombies/steampunk/music/AI?” or searches for the same online, offer them an anthology of stories about zombies or steampunk or music. You don’t need big-name writers; you need writers who are good at writing short fiction. If they happen to be absolutely massive, great!
Finally, I have my accepted stories all together, and the true terror begins. “Start strong, end long” is the anthologist’s credo, but I follow more rules when organizing a book. First-person stories shouldn’t sit next to one another. Make sure no more than one or two stories end with the cheapest of tricks in the short-story book, the single-sentence paragraph. (Other short-story books, not 120 Murders, but seriously, flip through one of the anthologies on your shelf, Dear Reader, and if more than half the stories end with a single-sentence paragraph, throw that book away.) Are writers using similar techniques? In 120 Murders, the combination of the dark tone and the musical theme inspired a few contributors to include countdown-style beats in their stories; these stories mustn’t be placed next to each other either.
Are any of the stories broadly similar? Brooklyn is the most noir and most writerly of cities, and I received two stories set in that borough, both about women killing someone and then fleeing. Oh no! Are the protagonists taking the same MTA line to the Port Authority in Manhattan? Should I write to the contributors and ask if they want to put in a sentence where their heroine peers across the aisle and sees the heroine of the other story? Is 120 Murders a shared-world anthology now? Does “Brooklyn is real” count as worldbuilding?! But, phew, the stories take place years apart. A month later, I receive a third story, this one about a hitman who specializes in assassinating women, and he’s waiting in the Port Authority. Oh no! Reading this third submission, I thought, Please have a smartphone, Mr. Assassin, please have a smartphone, since him getting a simple text would place him at the scene years after those fatal Brooklynites got on their busses. Yay, he had one!
Do I think about these details too much? No, such a thing is not possible. The dirty little secret of anthologies is that they serve as a way to have books with one’s name on the spine without the drudgery of having to produce novels. Anthology editing is easier than novel writing.
But it shouldn’t be that much easier. (Fear not, this parenthetical comment keeps this final paragraph from being but a single sentence. Anyway, work hard, and next time I announce an anthology, feel free to query me.)