That's My Bix!

Part of my PhD funding involves building experience and authority in the literary publishing world. Or, you know, such one may contrive through editing a literary journal. My first year in doctoral studies were supplemented by a role as assistant fiction editor — and my second year, I got a promotion to fiction editor. I enjoyed it, despite not really having a permanent assistant fiction editor due to the way that the program split out a new discipline, so we had no incoming fiction PhD student last year.

As I’ve mentioned before, ideally, in one’s third year, you leave the literary journal stuff to the fresher folks and focus entirely on you, baby, all you. However in my third year, they ran into the same problem they had the previous year without an assistant fiction editor — there was no one waiting in the wings to take my fiction editor cap hand off.

The directors of the various funding sources asked me if I’d take a bigger leadership role, and I said no. I’ve been “behind the scenes” editor before. Just because someone is good at something doesn’t mean they want to do it. I really like picking fiction. I weirdly even like reading stories that I know aren’t ready for publication. On some level, I feel like it makes you a better writer — and it definitely forms your eye for fiction that you like, dislike and want to read. Besides, rule one of being a writer is to read everything all the time. I used to read a lot more and gradually had gotten away from that — primarily with the advent of online life — so getting back to graduate school has meant an increased focus on what I now think of as “slow reading” — the kind of uninterrupted reading we do when we’re not simulatenously watching for new emails, tweet mentions, Facebook updates and the like. Non-scrolling, slow reading to the tune of 5000 words or more by the same author. Funny how rare that has gotten these days.

So I stayed on as fiction editor. We also flipped a managing editor and an editor in chief — and of course, I couldn’t keep my mouth shut about how to fix the process, the journal and the everything, so I ended up doing things like setting up mailing lists and running metrics and suggesting that KPIs are a good thing to have. I guess you can take a girl out of the digital publishing world but you can’t make her stop acting like a crazy corporate autobot.

The previous leadership had seen fit to remove one of the issues — and wasn’t going to hear otherwise about it. It seemed weird to shrink the publication for really no real reason other than tidying up, but at the time it wasn’t a fight I was interested in having. However, with the new EIC comes a sense of experimentation. I pitched an all-fiction issue to launch during the end of the year — and with a super short turnaround between a call for submissions and the publication. The crux of this was very Wendy-style logic. Our fiction readers were sitting there with nothing to do since we had already gone through first and second reads for the spring issue, so if we could shorten the timeframe between the call for submission and the time when they saw the benefits of their work, the publication wouldn’t feel as abstract. What’s more, half the time my biggest frustration in working with a team is that I could have done it faster myself than explain, discuss or teach someone how to do whatever it is. So my pitch went essentially like this: if we limit it to 100 submissions, we can try a new submission model and a new process model and “fail fast” — so if it doesn’t work, we’ll not have messed with the “real” issues, but if it DOES work, then we can borrow some of those tactics for the next call for submissions. I limited it to fiction because I didn’t want to force the other genre editors to do something that they didn’t firmly believe in/wasn’t a tested and true format, and also, quite honestly, I knew that if I needed to, I could just buckle down and read and select all of the submissions myself if I had to.

Boom — it all worked. It was a bit of a push on the managing editor who had to draft contracts during finals week, but all in all, it is coming out without a hitch. My assistant editor picked the cover image from about 14 images I offered as options — and it turned out that he picked the only one taken by a friend of mine, so that made me very happy. And the stories are some of my favorite that we’ve ever published. I can theorize as to why that is so, but honestly, I think our team is just really starting to formulate our tastes and know exactly what fits in the publication and what is off-brand or way out in left field.

The other thing that I haven’t mentioned to anyone — I modeled the concept of “dripping” the stories on Holidailies! God bless us every one. So there it is — if you’d like to see a bit of what I do for (one of) my day jobs, check out the special Dark Holidays edition. I’m very proud of our work and most excited to see what crazy thing they’ll let me talk them into next.