Editorial

Meet our Readers

Over the Transom: Meet Our Readers

BY Duff McCourt and Helen Michaud

Over the years, this column has mostly been my attempt to capture my thought process while reviewing submissions, but the actual process that stories go through from our inbox to the front page is much more collaborative. For nearly the past year, we’ve had Tim Ford and Lou Sytsma add their perspectives to the mix, which I believe only makes us stronger. In the hopes of giving a glimpse into how we select our stories, the three of us got together virtually to chat about how we approach reading for AE. This makes for a longer “Over the Transom” entry than the others, but hopefully a more entertaining one as well.

To read is human, but to skim ...

Over the Transom: The Parts That People Skip

BY Duff McCourt and Helen Michaud

It seems that every few weeks someone writes a piece about why agents will stop reading your manuscript, often within the first few sentences. It doesn’t seem fair, and perhaps it isn’t, but these are readers with a finely honed sense of what works — or more precisely, what they can sell — and they know that no one with buying power gets any more forgiving further downstream from them.

“he” and “she” or “I” and “you”

Over the Transom: A Rose Without a Name is Not as Cool a Companion

BY Duff McCourt and Helen Michaud

We get a lot of stories about pronouns in our inbox — characters who have no other handles than “he” and “she” or “I” and “you.” There’s a certain seductiveness for an author to leaving names unspecified — not only can you avoid coming up with an appropriate one, but you can argue that leaving things more open-ended allows readers to can fill in the blanks from experience and identify more closely with the characters. But there’s a risk associated with it as well.

Can you write a science fiction romance? Yes.

Over the Transom: What We Point to When We Say AE

BY Duff McCourt and Helen Michaud

I’m not here to argue about genre. AE is a science fiction magazine, but we freely — and proudly — admit that we have a generous interpretation of what fits in that category. A quick skim of our publishing history shows that we can be quite fond of stories that employ a light touch with science fictional elements. Indeed, you’ll find it hard to convince us that drawing a crisp distinction between “science fiction” and other genres is a useful endeavour. (Can you write a science fiction romance? Yes. A noir detective story? Yes. A coming-of-age tale? A comedy? Yes and most certainly yes.)