Penumbra (Short Stories) Moves Along

Despite My Whining, a Lot Is Getting Done

Someone’s not working.

The wheels keep churning at Cicaida Song Press. While I hyperfocus on the task that is more difficult, the other important stuff is getting done well, on time, and on track.

Editing

The two other editors and I are working with the accepted writers to improve their pieces. I’ve been lucky and none of the stories that I got needed any deep editing. That could include moving parts of the story around or rewriting a significant chunk. (Well, one of my writers did completely re-write her story, but it was 100 words and I didn’t ask her to do it.)

The most common edits I make are grammar, typos, and the like. After that, I try to get people to add more detail to their settings. I’m reading beautiful stories, but I cannot imagine where the action is taking place. It doesn’t need a lot, just a couple of strong details to hang my imagination on. Then come timeline slip ups, something happens before an event when it needs to happen after that event. It’s hard to catch all of those when you’re thinking big picture on the story. That’s what an editor is for.

Contracts

Before sending out contracts to everyone, I looked over the contract again. I was able to find more lawyer words and unnecessary crap that I could remove from the contract. So out it went. The contract is now a little shorter and easier to understand, which is my goal. It specifies our rights to the story and their rights.

I emailed the contracts out and got them back in short order from almost everyone. There are three contracts missing. One, I still need to send the contract to (my bad.) The other two I think I may have gotten and not recorded, so I need to go look for those before I email the writers again. This is the first time that so many of the writers have responded so quickly.

Biographies

I’ve also been collecting biographies for the back of the book. That way, if you like a sotry, you can find out a little bit more about the writer and where to find more of their writing. But each of them have their own choice to use about 100 words of what they want to include.

These came in quickly after I asked for them, too. I didn’t record them on the chart, though, so now I have to go back and check each one whether I have it or not. (I amaze myself that I will do one thing the easy way (contracts) and follow with a near identical task (biographies), which I do the hard way.) I know I have most of them at least.

Cover Art

We’ve found our cover art. We knew what we wanted: a picture of the eclipse at the stage called the penumbra. That’s where it’s just breaking out of the full eclipse and you see one bright spark on the side, before the crescent of the sun appears. We had found one taken by an artist, and agreed to buy it for $60. But he dissappeared and wouldn’t sign a contract or take our money.

So, we had to get creative. I live in Southern Illinois, in the area where both of the recent total eclipses happened. I remembered my best friend (Julie Weinert) is a great amateur photographer and took a lot of photos of the eclipse. I told her what we needed, and we looked through her eclipse photos. She did indeed have a good picture of the eclipse at just the stage we needed. I offered her money, but she said she’d give it for free. (She knows our shoe string budget.)

The Whiney Part

I need to email everyone who was not accepted and let them know. I originally started by emailing them one at a time with an analysis of their piece. Then I realized how many (over 150) of them there were. So I decided to write a letter to all, and then continue on with the individual replies.

To do this, I needed to build a mailing list. I needed to get the names out of Asana (the work tracking file the old editor had put them in) and into an Excel file (where I could work with them.) The problem was Asana. Cue Whining. I had to open each story’s file, and then open a file within that file to get the information I needed. Then, I could not copy and paste the information because Asana doesn’t allow that. So I had to memorize work titles, author names, and email addresses to transfer to Excel. One of the best things about this project is that we got submissions from all over the world. But international names can be difficult to spell and remember. I’m done with the project now, but I spend all last week on it. Whine.

What’s Next?

Check over on Cicada Song Press’s webpage, where I should shortly be posting seagull memes all over Mona Mehas’ Calling to Shore page. Just for fun.

I will hopefully be reviving the Facebook page, if I can figure out how to get in as an admin. I can’t even get the page to show me where I can log in as an admin, so this may be quite the adventure. Once I have that up, I can create content that can go to our other social pages.

I need to get the mailing list together. Right now we have a bunch of small mailing lists, I need to combine them into a master mailing list. Then I can get a newsletter together to announce the coming of Breaking Through the Penumbra.

I get to write all the internal materials for the book: copyright page, also by CSP, acknowledgements, editor’s note, and whatever else. I’ll make some initial choices of the font and style for the book. I’ll show those and a couple other choices to the other editors to make the final decisions. The center of all this is the table of contents, but I can’t put that in until we have all the stories in the order that we want them.

So, that’s my next week. Unless something pops up on fire. And something always does. Wish me luck!