Results: The Editors

• Editorial

BY The Editors

• Editorial

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.

• Editorial

BY Duff McCourt and Helen Michaud

If you read many of the editor’s interviews over at Duotrope, you’ll notice several common refrains in the answers to the question, “What is the best advice you can give people who are considering submitting work to your publication?”

• Editorial

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.

• Non Fiction

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• Editorial

BY Duff McCourt and Helen Michaud

We talk a lot about the importance in fiction of a strong beginning, but what is often harder to pull off successfully is the ending. This is especially true in short fiction, which doesn’t provide much space to introduce new characters, develop an intriguing situation, and bring it all to a satisfactory resolution (which doesn’t necessarily mean tying it up with a bow).

• Editorial

BY Duff McCourt and Helen Michaud

Characters in unbreakable cycles, or in literally inescapable traps, usually make for uninteresting stories.

• Editorial

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.)

• Reviews

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• Editorial

BY Duff McCourt and Helen Michaud

I don’t like the word slush. It calls to mind the vast quantities of snow, sleet, freezing rain and wintry mix that have collected everywhere in mounds of white-slowly-turning-to-grey after a recent spate of winter storms. It summons visions of dark, semifrozen pools whose depths are treacherously unknowable until it’s too late. And worst of all, the name slush pile as applied to a publisher’s unsolicited submissions recalls the image of weary editorial assistants mechanically slapping form rejection letters on manuscripts laden with the hopes and dreams of their authors.