Tag Archives: editing

It’s our duty to escape: Becoming a fiction editor at Strange Horizons

Six years ago, during the Covid shutdown, I found myself with a lot of time on my hands and facing the sudden collapse of what I had thought my future would look like. I was living in Pittsburgh at the time, just down the street from one of the city’s best features: the 400-acre, wooded hills of Allegheny Cemetery. It was the perfect place to go for long walks where I could, if only temporarily, escape from everything else. Unfortunately, I lived on the opposite side from the entrance gate.

To break out, I would have to break in.

Luckily, another of Pittsburgh’s distinctive features is its thriving anarchist community. Having made a few friends of the black-flag persuasion, I learned how to freely navigate the city—how to find secret staircases, abandoned boats in the river, and gaps in the chain-link cemetery fence.

Around the same time, I also started looking for escape where I had found it as a child: in science fiction and fantasy stories. A clean escape requires sharp bolt-cutters, so I sought out the cutting-edge—what are magazines publishing these days? Who’s the new Ursula K. Le Guin?

Pretty soon, I stumbled on an intriguing aubergine-colored website. It published beautiful and quirky stories, titled everything from “We Are Here to Be Held” to “Dirty Wi-Fi.” The magazine was totally free, dared to experiment, and appeared to be run like an anarchist commune (something, as I mentioned, I’d developed a certain fondness for).

Strange Horizons soon had my devoted readership. Shortly thereafter, it also had one of my early, awkward attempts at science fiction in its slush pile. I wanted to be a part of this beautiful organism, an international effort to open portals to other worlds. And at first, I thought that would be through gracing its pages with my genius.

After getting humbled, I reached out again a couple years later to volunteer as a slush reader. I got more humbled. As a slush reader, I learned that for every concept I considered myself clever for coming up with, there were a hundred people who had not only had the same idea, but turned it into a far better story. I learned I needed to read more. A lot more. Everything, actually.

So, I’m still working on that.

But I’m happy to announce that as of this year, I am getting to do so in the context of a new role at Strange Horizon:

Fiction editor (!!!?)

Six years ago, when I first fell in love with Strange Horizons, I could never have imagined I’d become one of its editors. I’ve still got total imposter syndrome. But I’m so grateful for the opportunity to become even more involved with the magazine that not only reignited my love for speculative fiction, but provided me with an invaluable escape during difficult times.

Ursula K. Le Guin once answered the criticism of “escapism” by affirming: “Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisoned by the enemy, don’t we consider it his duty to escape?” And, she concluded, “if we’re partisans of liberty, then it’s our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can.”

I still have a lot to read and a lot to learn. I’m still getting more humbled every day. But what I do know is how to break out by breaking in. How to find where someone has made a hole in the chain-link fence. How to wave my hands over my head like a crazy person and holler “this way! over here! OVER HERE!”

I can’t guarantee we won’t be escaping into a cemetery.

In fact, the first escape hatch I’m excited to share, “This Obituary Has Been Retracted” by P.C. Verrone, opens into something not unlike a city of the dead: told through obituaries in a 1980’s gay men’s magazine, it imagines a world where the AIDS epidemic suddenly and mysteriously changes course.

It’s really fun and it made me cry a lot, which is why I picked it.

Now get in, loser, we’re escaping.

Over here!!!

Using punctuation to lock readers into your protagonist’s POV

Life update! While I’m still pursuing writing, right now I’m detouring to focus specifically on developing my editing skills. Along with reading for Strange Horizons and Flash Fiction Online, I’ve taken on more freelance editing and story coaching jobs this year, and I’m working towards a copyediting certificate from UC San Diego. I thought some of the assignments I turned in for the first course in the UCSD program, a grammar intensive, might make for fun blog posts, so here’s one about using the semicolon (and other punctuation) to guide the reader through description of setting in a story, locking them into your protagonist or narrator’s POV.

Using punctuation to lock readers into your protagonist’s POV

According to The McGraw-Hill Education Handbook of English Grammar and Usage, semicolons should be reserved for instances “when the two parts of a compound sentence—the two independent clauses—are very closely related” (260). But, assuming fluid prose and sound rhetoric, all consecutive sentences from any given text may be expected to bear a degree of “close” relationship to each other. Although one can imagine two sentences side by side which bear absolutely no relation—for example, “I find it difficult to understand contemporary punctuation usage through studying examples from Moby Dick. My cat just vomited on my toe”—in practice, most writing will not contain sentences this jarringly disconnected. So how does one determine if two independent clauses are closely related enough to warrant a semicolon?

I’d like to explore this question in the context of writing fiction, particularly in describing setting. In a passage of setting description, generally the sentences are all “closely related”—they all describe the setting, lighting up aspects of place formerly obscured, like a flashlight beam in a night hiker’s hand. So when and why might a semicolon be used?

When describing setting in fiction, I try to think about where, based on the details I select, I am turning the reader’s attention, and how the reader is spatially experiencing the world of the book. If the protagonist enters a garden, I could describe the grackles in the pecan trees, the stink of stagnant pond water, or the irises wilting in the afternoon sun—details which ground the reader in a real sense of place, while also doing something to characterize the protagonist/narrator, whom the reader will infer (consciously or subconsciously) is the one noticing and pointing these things out to them. Just look at how setting informs character through the narrator in Ella Fitzgerald’s song, “Tenderly,” who describes how “the evening breeze / caressed the trees / tenderly,” compared to the narrator in T. S. Eliot’s poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” who describes “the evening spread out against the sky / like a patient etherized upon a table”!

Recognizing that description of setting is really simulation of character gaze or movement through space, an author may use punctuation to moderate that gaze or movement—and the reader’s “movement” alongside them. Punctuation may serve not simply as grammar notation or reproduction of spoken language’s rhythm, but as a lever or regulating valve for the reader’s flow through the physical world described in the text.
Then, while all the sentences in a passage of description may technically be “closely related,” different punctuation choices can influence how closely a reader feels physically proximal to what is described, depending on the effect you want to produce.

Consider this passage of setting description from Satin Island by Tom McCarthy:

There was a small window. A few feet from this there was a drape that hung along the wall: this big wrinkled curtain. I don’t know why it was there—maybe for warmth; behind it there was just a wall as far as I could tell.


Each of these sentences could be said to be equally related, because they are all describing something about the same room. But McCarthy doesn’t join them all with semicolons. He saves it for a specific impact at the end, while slowly escalating towards it through other punctuation, tightly controlling how the reader moves through and experiences the space:

First, the initial period forces the reader to come up short at the window, simulating the way one is naturally drawn to and transfixed by a source of light upon entering an otherwise dark room. Next, the colon similarly emphasizes the prominence of another detail: a peculiar curtain, which might have blended into the shadows if only a comma had preceded it. While the window is “small,” the curtain is “big,” and McCarthy’s next punctuation choices serve to magnify the oppressive curtain even further: an em-dash links question and answer bubbling in the protagonist’s mind in response to the curtain. Finally, McCarthy drops a semicolon to provoke the reader, after a tense pause, to dare to draw back the curtain.

If McCarthy had used a period here instead, the reader would not experience the sense of a continuously deeper slide into the room, as if sucked into a whirlpool. The punctuation parallelism would have made the curtain and wall seem to sit statically next to each other, two-dimensional instead of three-dimensional. The reader would know there was a wall behind the curtain—but she would not have pulled back the curtain herself to discover it.

Whenever you write a passage describing setting, return during the editing phase to interrogate its punctuation. Think about how a comma might dip a reader’s finger into the pool, where a period pushes them all the way in. Could the enclosure of one detail in parentheses better effect the reader poking their head around a corner? Consider if a colon or an em-dash announces the presence of the gothic mansion at the end of the lane—and its door, creaking open, slowly, very slowly . . .