Copy. Edit. Proof.

It’s been tough lately. EDF’s slush pile is mountains high, and the decisions ultimately come down to me. With nasty commenters lurking around every corner, hating every story and casting aspersions on my editorial skills and integrity, I was starting to doubt myself and second-guess every decision I made. 

The EDF team made a decision to crack down on nastiness in the comments, and that helped a bit, but my confidence was still seriously shaken.

And then I saw THIS. And then THIS. And I’ve been smiling all day.

When a story sticks in someone’s mind and speaks to him or her, when someone is compelled to re-read a piece two days later, when someone feels she or he would have been sorry to miss it… that story has done its job right. When I’ve had a hand in bringing that story to publication, when I was the one who said ‘yes’ to it, I know I’ve done my job right too.

None of this is even about me — it’s all about the stories and their authors — but I’m feeling the love anyway.

Imagine a guy standing on a street corner handing out lattes. Or chai, hot chocolate, whatever suits your fancy. And he’s just handing them out, not asking for anything in return — he’s got a tip jar, though, on the pavement near his feet.

A little further down the block, there’s a smiling girl with a tray of sandwiches and an empty paper cup marked TIPS. “Help yourself,” she says. “No charge.”

There is also a café that serves hot drinks and sandwiches, right there in the same block: eight-dollar paninis that you can have cold or grilled, the coffee made from expensive beans.

Do you buy the $8 sandwich and $4 latte from the café? Or do you take the free ones from the nice people standing on the street?

You take the free ones; of course you do. We all do, and if the supply of free food is constant and continues for long enough, the café goes out of business. The real question is: do you give the latte guy and the sandwich girl a tip? (Oh, and you might also wonder who’s paying for the food.)

Just in case anyone has missed it, this is really about web content.

Online readers don’t want to pay, and they (you) don’t have to. It’s the street where free food is handed out. The donate-now buttons are easy to ignore.

Writers want to be paid. It’s a profession, it has value, those pennies-per-word are earned, dammit!

The publishers are supposed to figure this thing out: pay the writers what they’re worth, don’t charge the readers anything, hope the Google Ads at least cover the webhost bills. The way I see it, there are currently only two solutions — backing from a group with money and an agenda (which kind of moves away from the point of pure unbiased journalism or an untainted commitment to quality fiction), or else sales of tangible products and commercial services (books, t-shirts, training courses, etc.).

This means that if Latte Guy wants to make money, he’s going to be selling you Amway (or at least an enviro-friendly travel mug) while he makes your free coffee. And Sandwich Girl would like to talk to you about faith and the state of your soul.

When I was asked, recently, to assist in the judging of a flash fiction competition, I thought — no problem! After all, it’s essentially the same task as what I do every day, or so I assumed.

But…

Making an editorial decision means judging a story only against itself and against the standards of the publication it’s being considered for: does it meet our definition of a story, will it appeal to our readers, is the prose up to our standards, does it have a theme and an impact on the reader — does it achieve what it sets out to do?

Notice that those are all yes/no questions. Each story is either a yes or a no for the magazine. It’s not always easy, exactly, especially in borderline cases, but the practice and habit of it are simple.

Judging stories against each other is hard. Stories aren’t meant to be judged against each other, just as different fruits aren’t meant to be ranked on a scale; I like plums better than pears, say, but that doesn’t make plums better than pears in general — unless the plum in question is perfectly ripe and the pear it’s being held against is a bit too soft or hard.

Picking out the poor fruit is easy enough. This one is overwritten and exploding with purple prose, that one is flavourless and doesn’t present much of a theme. But once the list has been narrowed down to the real contenders, ranking them is the devil’s own job.

I didn’t know that before, and now I do.

Coming soon to an ezine on your screen…

Looking at Every Day Fiction’s calendar for September, it suddenly struck me that we have rather a wealth of sweetness and romance featuring older people coming up. Of course, when I say “wealth”, I mean three – but ordinarily we go months without publishing even one of those. We’ve also got plenty of humour and sci-fi, but we’re a bit short of serious literary fiction.

At the end of last month, putting together August’s calendar, we were scraping around for light humour pieces and swimming in dark suspense and horror.

These things have a way of coming in waves, in bunches – not just genre, but something more specific, like romances between seniors. Sometimes I wonder whether they’re connected by some prompt or writing group exercise; maybe when I notice a pattern, there really is a pattern.

Or maybe it’s just coincidence.

I’ve been meaning to do this for a while.

Not that I don’t already have a blog — I do! — two, in fact, though I hardly ever update them. But one of them is about reading and book reviews, and the other is about writing, and neither seemed to be the place to write about being an editor and all the fun and drama that comes with the job.

I doubt I’ll have much to say about copywriting, except to gasp now and then, “They actually pay me to do this?!” (Anyone accustomed to the penny-or-two-a-word of the fiction world will no doubt share my ongoing goggle-eyes and slack jaw at the thought of twenty cents a word – yes, really!) You may, however, be treated to the occasional rant about proofreading.