notes from the Production Meeting

The editors of Electric Spec had our Production Meeting this week. Approximately 6 beers and 2 scotches were consumed. We had a large number of very good stories in hold-for-voting, so it was tricky to narrow down the field to 5. Eventually we prevailed, however, and authors are being emailed the good (or bad) news as we speak. Hopefully all the hold-for-voting authors will hear back from us by the end of this week.
When we accept a story we send along a contract. Once the author accepts the contract we start editing the story. Things move pretty quickly this month since we're publishing the next issue on August 31.

Here are some tips based on our story discussion:

• A strong voice is important but other things are important as well, namely, a plot
• Make sure your story is speculative fiction. Macabre fiction, in particular, can be tricky here. For example, if a story contains a mysterious blurry figure, is it a ghost or an illusion? If it is a ghost you've got speculative fiction. If it's ambiguous...maybe not.
• It's probably not a good idea to include tampons in your story. Editors are susceptible to the ick factor like everyone else.
• We don't like super long (over 5000 words) stories. They're a pain to edit.

Other take-aways from the meeting: we're going to modify our webpage to indicate that we've been taking longer to get through slush. :(
We're going to ask authors if they'd like to contribute to the blog.
We were thinking of doing something special for our ten-year anniversary (next year), but we're leaning against it.
I guess that's all the highlights. We'll start previewing coming attractions next week.