Confessions of a Virgin Editor

I learned of Sarah E. Glenn and Gwen Mayo's story and invited them to guest blog on Writers Who Kill, the Salad Bowl Saturday version. As writers and now publishers, they have a different perspective than those who only do one thing or the other.

Without further ado, here is Sarah E. Glenn.

~ Jim
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In 2012, I lived out an author's version of a country song. My father's health condition went terminal, and my spouse and I relocated to help care for him. We gave up our house, our jobs, and our healthcare, but we also gave up our writing friends, Bouchercon, Magna cum Murder, and anything passing for quiet time.

In a country song, the dog dies. In the writer's version, your publisher folds. We loved the Pill Hill folks, but, like us, life circumstances dictated that they focus on something more important than the written word. I hope that in time Pill Hill will reopen.

So: 2013 begins, we've begun writing again, but we have no publisher to turn to. Gwen has a sequel suitable for a mainstream press, but I tend to write weird stuff. Sometimes it's just odd stuff, other times I combine it with non-mainstream heroes. We both like writing short stories, but openings for our special flavor of fiction are scarce. Pill Hill had all sorts of great anthology ideas: one of my favorites was “The ePocalypse - Emails at the End”. Teams of authors wrote stories that were purely interactions between people facing the end of the world. Gwen and I wrote a story about two detectives who have one final case they're trying to solve.

With a favorite venue closed, we decided to publish our own anthologies and invite others to contribute to them. We've had some good responses from our friends at Sisters in Crime - several members have submitted stories.

Our maiden effort is STRANGELY FUNNY: a collection of stories that combines the paranormal with the funny. We received several good stories built around the popular creatures of the night - vampires and zombies, but we also got a great story about a group of animated toys that pull a heist. We received one about a talking lizard-chicken in Native American myth. I also read so many stories about cannibalism that I'm considering doing an anthology of them. Who would have thought cannibalism could be funny, outside of "To Serve Man"?

What I've learned so far: why editors are such stick-in-the-muds about format guidelines. I can spot a typo or a homophone and fix it. If an author has given up on the Oxford comma, I can (and will) fix that. If someone goes old school and puts two spaces at the end of a sentence, I can do a global find and replace. Quotation marks are more problematic. Single or double varies according to the country one is from. A global find and replace is a bad idea when a story has a lot of conversations and contractions. What frustrates me the most, however, are those items invisible unless you use the magic setting on Word - hard returns and altered indents. I've definitely made some additions to the writers' guidelines on our site.

I've also learned that there are a lot of good writers out there. Choosing the stories for STRANGELY FUNNY became very difficult, especially when I had a dozen good stories left on my “short” list, but only enough space for four. I'm a writer. I know how rejection feels. I didn't want to say “no,” but I did. The ones that closed the deal: 'monsters' with all-too-human flaws, tales of otherworldly “misfits” dealing with real world situations, and paranormals with unusual handicaps, like a vampire with broken teeth. I like things a little “different,” even by the standards of fantasy and horror.

Right now, I'm hoping people will enjoy our first offering. Come back in a year, and I'll have more to share.

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Sarah E. Glenn is the editor for Mystery and Horror, LLC. She has a degree in journalism, but didn’t really learn grammar until she studied Greek and Latin. STRANGELY FUNNY, her maiden voyage as an anthology editor, is a collection of humorous paranormal tales. Contributors include Joette Rozanski, WWK’s Gloria Alden, and Catriona McPherson.

STRANGELY FUNNY is scheduled for August 1, 2013 release.

You can preorder at their website http://www.mysteryandhorrorllc.com/products.html

Catch Sarah at her blog http://saraheglenn.blogspot.com or

their website http://www.mysteryandhorrorllc.com