This is a very long article.
If you’re interested, we’re laying bare the juicy gossip, true delights, embarrassing truths, and the often painful realities of running a small magazine. It’s also about what we did right, and what we learned from Reflection’s Edge. It’s the result of my having asked my staff to tell me about what it was like here at RE, with little or no direction from me on how they should frame their thoughts. Not everyone chose to write something, but those who did dug deep.
Because of this, I haven’t edited much, though a few times, to avoid repetition, extensive tangents, or just to improve readability, I’ve made a few cuts or rearranged things slightly. It’s up to you to decide how much you want to see; I’m laying it all out here.
We hope you may learn from this; we wrote this in particular for aspiring editors everywhere. At the very least, we think you might find it interesting.
Ciro Faienza, Reviewer, Staff Writer, and First Fan: The RE Project
Matt Switliski, Reviewer: The Outsider’s Inside Perspective
Chad Banks, Slusher Extraordinaire: RE’s Lessons in Writing
Sharon Dodge, Editor-in-Chief: The Origins, Business, and Heart of RE
Ciro Faienza, Reviewer, Staff Writer, and First Fan: The RE Project
In my head I always thought of it as “the Reflection’s Edge project.” It would put out issues periodically, and readers might digest it one month at a time, but really it was an unbroken, ongoing effort to use fiction (and the power to curate that fiction) as a corrective for the state of short-form genre.
Genre, you see, had fallen behind the times.
That’s a provocative, elitist statement, one that privileges my own viewpoint over that of others—the sort of thing one does when demanding an audience’s continued attention. The audience needs to know that you’re doing something different, something more interesting or entertaining or savvy than someone else.
It’s the sort of thing many genre publishers have been doing for years. While in other corners of the publishing world editors were watching the boundary between genre and literature quietly erode—via McCarthy in western and crime, Ballard and Lethem in science fiction, and Elizabeth Hand in fantasy, to name a few—genre publishers themselves steadfastly maintained the boundaries that had protected them from the criticisms of the ivory tower types who said that genre was low-brow by definition. Genre is not ashamed of plot. Genre doesn’t need to hide behind fancy, hand-waving prose. In genre a hero solves a problem or the problem solves the hero. Beginning, middle, and end. Action. Substance trumps style.
And so forth.
The trouble with this mantra is that it has, perversely, closed off genre to changes in storytelling that have vastly expanded the field of possible fiction. Writers of science fiction, or erotica, or fantasy, who turned to genre because they could tell stories there that were not allowed in literature, woke up and found that their own conventions, isolated by dogma, were now in fact the more conservative. Among the many slush pile rejections from the established zines were swaths of fine, progressive writing that never found a home because the market had no place for fiction that ended ambiguously or played Joycean games or followed a feminine structure or privileged character over plot.
There is no good reason these stories should go homeless.
This is what drew me to Reflection’s Edge. I was an avid reader long before I wrote my first article (an infodump piece on hacker culture for writers of cyberpunk). RE was publishing fiction that I couldn’t find in Asimov’s or Fantasy & Science Fiction (a fact which says no ill about the quality of work they do publish). It is why I felt like I’d discovered something when I read S. Foster’s “Viscosity Breakdown” or any number of pieces by Claude Lalumière.
I’m not sure how much of this viva la revolución Sharon was on board for. I know that for her the zine was about safe places for marginalized readers and writers (which we might euphemize as “thoughtful”), and that I must have given her some work in de-spicing my reviews (all of which I treated as pieces in the RE project, not the zine). The point, I think, is that I felt safe to do so.
With the close of the Reflection’s Edge chapter, it is my hope that the zine’s readers and writers have taken to heart the idea that there are others out there who want these kinds of stories, that it will not always be impossible to publish a piece about an autistic man in the future who solves no problems but sheds a little light on a small corner of human experience. Nor will it always be impossible to find it. The field is expanding. Even as zines like this one close, new zines with new niches pop up every month.
And I will always be able to say that, for a time, I lent my own voice to this one. To the readers and writers, thank you.
Matt Switliski, Reviewer: The Outsider’s Inside Perspective
I’ve been reading speculative fiction for over a decade now. Later, when I decided to pursue writing, I had no idea that places besides novels and short fiction collections were home to the kind of stories I loved. The kind of stories I liked to write, even to this day. When I did find out about the magazines for spec fic—both in print and online—I admit, I got jealous. The more I read author blogs and news sites devoted to the field, the more I felt out of the loop. On the other side of that invisible wall were writers and editors having a grand old time in a club to which I had not yet gained access. While I loved what they ultimately produced, I wanted to be involved in that world. To become not just a reader but a writer. A professional writer.
Reflection’s Edge was my entry into that world. Though I didn’t work long for the magazine, I learned a great deal during that time. I learned just how difficult publishing a magazine was. I had experience in journalism. I knew the problems in putting together a weekly newspaper, but surely it was easier for a smaller, monthly e-zine? Editor blogs I read were rife with mention of delays and roadblocks to publication. Still, I could really only appreciate those problems when I experienced them first-hand. I also learned that there were other people like me who cared so much about this kind of literature that they were willing to devote their time and skills for little to no tangible reward; usually, it was just the satisfaction of a job well done, of providing another avenue to showcase the work we believed in.
Maintaining a magazine devoted to fiction has, to my knowledge, never been easy. Especially not in the realm of speculative fiction, where new ventures rise and fall quicker than any one person can follow. Especially with the economy being at the forefront of so many people’s thoughts. That RE has kept on for nearly six years, when so many don’t last a fraction of that time, is a testament to the dedication of both its tremendous staff and its equally invaluable readers. If no one were there on the other end receiving these words, we’d just be shouting into a void. Personally, I will always be grateful to Reflection’s Edge for inviting me into the world of authors and editors, even if I only got a glimpse of it. The upside is, I know what I’m working toward now. And work I will.
Chad Banks, Slusher Extraordinaire: RE’s Lessons in Writing
One of the biggest lessons I learned as a slusher is that flash fiction is incredibly hard to write. When your word count is that low, every single one of them counts, to say nothing of the fact that it’s a challenge to tell a coherent and compelling story in that short a time. It’s almost like poetry in that sense. You don’t have quantity, so the only thing that can lift your story out of the pile is quality.
I’m an aspiring writer myself (most slushers are). Slushing for RE was instructive in many ways regarding both craft and professionalism. In the end, I’ve learned there are more things that are going to get a story rejected than vice versa. Unfortunate, but true. What you have to remember is that a slusher’s job isn’t to figure out why a story is good. It’s to figure out if it is bad. After that, it’s the editor that figures out what’s good about it.
It’s a challenging task, especially at RE where we were always trying to maintain a quick response time. Our goal for responses was to respond to anything we weren’t interested in within twenty-four hours to afford the author a chance to get the piece out to a different market that might pick it up. Acceptances took longer, but that’s because they had to. I don’t remember the exact numbers, but we were somewhere above eight days average response time on DuoTrope when I came on full-time. I’m proud to say we ended our run at 3.4 days per response (including acceptances, of course), which as I’m writing this is good for a four-way tie for fourteenth on DuoTrope’s list of the top 25 swiftest responding markets, a feat I’d never have managed without the help of some amazing back-up slushers. Thanks, y’all. You know who you are.
When you have days where you’ve got to slush fifteen/twenty submissions, you have to get better and better at evaluating a story quickly. You get into a certain groove: skip through the current crop of submissions to find the flash fiction, because it takes about ten seconds to figure out if they’re any good. Go back to the medium word counts, and save your eight and nine thousands for last. Plus, there are triggers that tell you whether or not a story is worth your editor’s time. They show up time and again, and most of them are negative. First person narrative, and the protagonist is an unrepentant misogynist? Rejected. Male protagonist launches into arias about a woman’s body? Thanks very much for playing. Grammatical mistakes in the draft; cookie-cutter, pop-culture-archetype characters; premises cribbed straight out of some movie every genre reader and their mother has seen; horrible things happening to good people for no reason; I could ramble on, but I won’t.
Now that our run is done, I find I’m going to miss it more than I might have thought. I had a lot of fun slushing for this zine. It was a big part of my routine for over a year, and even though there were many times when it was tedious as hell, it was still something I looked forward to. If our inbox was backed up, it was a challenge. If it was all caught up, that was an accomplishment to be proud of. The whole process actually changed how I think about fiction. I’m more analytical about story now, because I had to be (especially when I needed to write feedback, which we always gave if the author requested it). Even when I’m just reading for pleasure, I’m watching for what’s working and what’s not. Before RE, I might have thought that sounded like a terrible way to read, but now I find that it isn’t because the really good stuff is going to get to me anyway.
That, I suppose, is the ultimate lesson for me. Even as I was reading (jaded, anti-social, light-and-love-hating misanthrope that I am), I was realizing that no slusher can actually be so jaded that a writer can’t get them back if the story and characters are compelling enough. It’s the thing that opens the door to slushers becoming slushers in the first place. We like the reading.
Romie Stott, Assistant, Consultant, and All-Around RE Backbone: the In-Depth History of RE and Other Scandals
RE, for me, started around the kitchen table at Sharon’s mother’s house. (The Sharon in this article is Sharon Dodge, founder, sponsor, and Editor-in-Chief of Reflection’s Edge.) I’ve known Sharon since birth. I believe we were at times literally nursed side by side. I officiated her wedding. We spent most of our youth drawing maps of imaginary places and telling spec fic stories to entertain each other. We hadn’t heard the word “slipstream” yet, but that’s what we were doing.
In November 2004, we were two years out of college. I had an economics degree but had spent the time since then as a freelance writer and theater professional, occasionally dabbling in filmmaking. Sharon had taken her English and Spanish fluency and moved to Japan to teach language classes, then to Michigan to care for family members. She was back in Dallas and kind of at loose ends; she’d written a lot of fiction, but none of it was going anywhere, and it was all getting rejected for the same reason most of my fiction was getting rejected: it was science fiction, but it was literary and girly, and maybe only halfway science fiction and halfway fantasy, or halfway horror and halfway western, or . . . maybe it would be a better fit in another magazine?
I’m enough of a conspiracy theorist and Sharon has enough faith in people that we were able to compromise on a working assumption that there was an accidental patriarchal establishment which didn’t know it felt threatened by genre-bending and feminist subtext, where editors had never had to recognize that when they couldn’t root for our protagonists that said more about them than about us. It wasn’t about the story-reading public; we’d both spent enough time in marginalized fan fiction communities that we knew an audience like us was out there, looking for the kind of stories we looked for. Sharon decided to do something about it, for the sake of readers like us and writers like us. It’s right there, in the banner at the banner at the top of the website (or it used to be, before the redesign; now it’s at the bottom).
I was not, initially, the Associate Editor. I was just there to egg things on and give unasked-for opinions on color palettes and articles that might be good. Maybe write a book review or two. And insist on the title, which was coined by an ex of mine. Sharon had her heart set on “The Blue Door,” which was a problem because that was an erotica website. I had to explain the concept of “working blue.”
I think I became Associate Editor the night before the first issue was published, when Sharon was scrambling to get pieces edited and up, and I was . . . there. I’m always there. She feeds me.
And so began a long process of Sharon fighting to make a comfortable space for marginalized genre writing that fell into cracks between literature and pulp, me arguing that we should be more avant-garde and crusading, and Sharon humoring me by suggesting that perhaps we could be a comfortable space for avant-garde crusaders, but in a quiet, peaceful way. And then giving me food. Lots of food. I couldn’t go home from a meeting without a takeaway bag.
I stepped down as Associate Editor in 2007, when I left the country for grad school and an ensuing lack of free time, but I still popped in from time to time as Contributing Editor. (I wanted “Editor At Large” because it sounded more provocative; Sharon went with “Contributing Editor” for the same reason.) Two things that didn’t change were my interest in how the magazine functioned as a magazine, and my access to all the databases. Were we reaching the people we thought we would, or someone else entirely? What might have been the possible results of alternate editorial choices?
Here is my postmortem for other current and prospective editors, and a dash of alt-history for everyone else.
Who read our magazine?
I strongly suspect our core demographic (intentionally or not) was middle class English and North American women in their 20s and 30s, who stopped by RE during the day while at work or while watching their kids. We never did any reader surveys; my conclusion is based on a combination of letters we received from active readers, the cover letters of writers who submitted, and webmaster tools that let me track when people visited and where they came from.
Something I was never sure of is whether our readers were the same group of people month to month. I think there were about 30 people who’d read any book review we published; otherwise, the numbers were all over the place. I’d be surprised if more than 10 people read any given issue “cover to cover”—since we’re online, and since we published a range of material, people tended to pick and choose. Many of the articles and stories were linked to directly, and readers who came from author websites or to read a particular nonfiction article did not necessarily click through to our other content.
The nonfiction had a longer shelf life than the fiction. Especially successful are articles that act as primers and offer fact rather than speculation or opinion: “English for Time Travelers, part one,” “Writing Realistic Violence,” “When a Man Loves Another Man” (about the mechanics of gay sex), and “Chains of Words: Writing Sadomasochism.” These typically got more or as many hits a month as our brand new material. Also popular were a few of our link lists—especially the slang, but also “You Are When You Eat.” The former gets us the most hits through search engines, although the erotica story “In the Apple Tree” also does very well for us in that respect. In general, erotica gets read more than other kinds of fiction—it’s something people reliably search for on the web, and they don’t have a preconceived notion of which site they should go to in order to find it.
Any time we published someone with an online fan base, their story or essay got a lot of hits. However, these hits didn’t necessarily produce a steady stream of visits; we got a lot of readers the first month, when presumably the author sends a note out to a mailing list, or posts in a blog, but authors rarely took the extra step and put up a sustained link on their website, whether out of forgetfulness or humility. When authors did put a permanent link on a website, we continued to get visits to that story or article even years later. In total, these links made up about 17% of our monthly hits. Older articles and stories were often more popular than newer ones as they got indexed by other websites and search engines.
Our Editorial Voice
We never had a mission statement. I wrote draft statements from time to time, usually when I was annoyed with someone outside the magazine. Sharon set these aside, on the grounds that coming out in favor of certain things suggested we were against other things, when she wanted to welcome anyone who chose to sit at our table. One of these draft statements lives on in altered form as this 2005 Letter from the Editors.
Another attempt in 2007:
“We want to publish stories that stretch thought as far as it can go. We want to walk in the space between what is and what could be. We want to publish stories that bend or cross the line of genre. We want to incorporate cultural perspectives that have been sidelined by traditional genre publishing. We want to say: the stuff on that side of the mirror looks a lot like the stuff over here. We want to say: genre fiction doesn’t have to be a ghetto; it’s as smart and insightful as literature and as entertaining as a crime thriller, and our reviews say as much. Genre fiction is not really a frog; it’s a prince.”
Since we kept our mission statements mostly to ourselves, readers formed their own conclusions. They could see that we mostly published faerytale-like stories with primarily fantasy or horror elements and female or young adult protagonists. That was partly a function of what people sent us; some years we were the only people publishing that kind of thing, whereas there were plenty of markets for straight science fiction, horror, erotica, or epic fantasy, and they could pay their authors more. We were always surprised to get so few westerns, which is a genre almost no one publishes in short form; we did our best to get the word out that we were Texan and liked westerns. Ultimately, I think the secret to getting more westerns would have been publishing more westerns, but the submissions we received were mostly formulaic, and often either racist or misogynist—not what we were looking for.
Based on the character of Sharon’s monthly letter from the editor, I don’t think anyone would be surprised to learn she’d spent time as an elementary school teacher, or that she was fond of Jane Austen. Her front-page blurbs after each story title tended to read a bit like mystical chants—long flowing sentences, presumably for the purpose of putting people in a receptive frame of mind. To me, there was always something soothing about the site, like a cup of chamomile tea before bedtime. It surprised me a little that people gravitated to that during the day rather than at night.
I don’t know why the frog was our mascot and central to our early site design, although as you can see I tried to incorporate it into a mission statement. As far as I know, Sharon just liked it. She claimed it got fan mail. It’s still in the top left corner, although I sometimes forget it’s there.
The Role of Nonfiction
I had fairly free rein over the nonfiction section from 2004 through 2007; the idea was that it was the “for writers” part of “for thoughtful readers and writers.”
I tried to focus on articles which would inspire authors who had not yet attempted a particular genre or technique, or authors looking for a new idea or concept to stimulate their creativity. To that end, I published a lot of overviews: “here’s what SM/hacker/neo-pagan subcultures are like,” “here are some alternate ways to present discrimination and racism,” “here’s the history of vampire fiction/food/combat,” “here are some tricks you might not have tried for delivering exposition/world building/creating a character.”
These overviews were delivered in fairly broad brushstrokes: not nuts-and-bolts so much as food for thought. I conceived them as a bit like writing prompts, with the difference that I also wanted them to be entertaining in their own right. Basically, I was looking for toys for writers at any skill level.
That occasionally included opinion articles, about which Sharon and I went back and forth. There was always a worry that too many of these articles would be indulgent, or that an individual opinion was overly one-sided. (Which, by definition, they were.) Rightly or wrongly, I pushed for them when I could, in the hope of stimulating high-level debate about genres, works, and practices; I tend to think of those articles as targeting genre-reader non-writers — lurkers, effectively.
What I didn’t like to do was to try to teach people how to write, or to say “here is what you’re doing wrong” (unless was funny to do so). I think general advice about writing is mostly useless, and people become better writers by reading a lot and writing a lot. (Obviously, as an editor, I do think individual critiques are valuable.)
This was another regular debate, I think mainly because in the early years Sharon was dealing with the slush pile and I wasn’t. (We later brought on slush readers, to whom we are eternally grateful.) A lot of the stories she rejected had the same problems, and she desperately wanted to get the word out. We published at least four articles with the thesis “don’t over-describe,” but Sharon would suggest it again every month or two. My counterargument was usually something to the effect that as a reader, whatever my skill level, the last thing I want is to be lectured.
The other regular editorial debate, on which we held a summit approximately once a year, was the question of “he or she” versus “they” in sentences like “When an Ancient Roman wanted to leave a party, they asked for their slippers.” (The alternative: “When an Ancient Roman wanted to leave a party, he or she asked for his or her slippers.”) I argued for “they” for simplicity’s sake; it was acceptable common usage through the 1800s, and I think the 20th century grammarian crusade against it is silly (and fighting a losing battle with linguists). Sharon eventually came around to this view, to my great surprise, but only in private life; the magazine would stay out of the fight to reclaim “they” until it was settled in the wider culture. We usually concluded our summits by agreeing to alternate between using “he,” “she,” and sentences reworded in the plural (“When Ancient Romans wanted to leave a party. . .”).
Where’s the Money?
RE’s elephant in the room was always financing; we are not and have never been cash-flow positive. This enterprise has increasingly been funded by Sharon, to the tune of around $200 a month, although our costs vary depending on how many stories we publish. None of our staff has ever drawn down a salary, although staff are paid for articles at the same rate as non-staff writers. Sharon herself puts in around 20 hours a week now, thanks to the new site layout (which I think is harder to navigate as a reader, but which requires much less html from the editors) and the slush readers; other staff mileage varies, and Sharon used to work a lot more.
Initially, we planned to finance the site through a combination of advertising and donations. The explanation for why this fell through is very simple and not particularly flattering.
1. Sharon hates soliciting ads or donations, and didn’t have time.
2. I hate soliciting ads or donations, and didn’t have the authority to make changes I thought would make it easier to attract ads and donations.
3. We hired a succession of ad guys to take action, and each of them tried contacting one person, said “this is hard,” and quit.
In more human terms, what happened was that Sharon founded the magazine in November, and in December she was offered a full-time job she didn’t feel she could pass up, at which she still works. When I say full-time job, I really mean full-time plus overtime. And she decided it was more time efficient and less stressful to work $200 of overtime a month than to seek out advertisers. A few years ago, I forget when exactly, we raised what we paid authors; that was when Sharon got a raise. In the redesign, there isn’t even room for ads.
Over the years, I suggested various initiatives to make the magazine self-sustaining. I brought up 501c3 nonprofit status at least once a week; one of the reasons we couldn’t attract donations was that they were not tax deductible. Sharon got hung up on the word “nonprofit” and was convinced that since she hoped to someday have a salary, the magazine was for profit. I think she had a mental image that nonprofit equaled soup kitchen or free clinic.
I spent two years pointing out the nonprofit status of various theater companies, and trying to explain in jargon-free terms that we legally qualified since our primary mission was cultural and not monetary. I forwarded links to grant after grant we qualified for, with promises I would fill out the applications. Sharon finally agreed to nonprofit status in 2006. I got her all the paperwork.
Then she got very sick, and that was all we could pay attention to for a while. Then she was better, but busy bringing the magazine back after its hiatus. Then she moved and lost the paperwork. Then it was 2007, and I was on my way overseas. The very last e-mail I sent as Associate Editor read, among other things: apply for 501c3 status.
Never happened. For the record, if you are a woman interested in running a U.S.-based magazine in a marginalized publishing niche, there are grants out there for you. Some good starting places: the National Endowment for the Arts and womenarts.org.
There were other funding streams we considered that didn’t pan out for one reason or another. We were a registered Amazon seller, so if someone followed one of our links to a book and bought it, we got a small percentage of that sale. There were three problems:
1. There weren’t a lot of click-throughs.
2. On any book review that wasn’t by me, it was likely the links weren’t properly formatted to have our seller tag on them.
3. Nobody knew that if they used the Amazon search box on our site that it gave us money and cost them nothing more than the price of what they already planned to buy.
I wanted something right on the site that said “want to support RE? Buy your books through us!” but that was rejected for aesthetic reasons and because Sharon worried it might put people off or make them feel guilty. After a very long time, I got her to add it to the end of each letter from the editor . . . and soon after, we got a site redesign that eliminated the Amazon box.
Coincidence? You be the judge. All I’ll say is Sharon really loves all of you.
Webcomics run on t-shirt sales and hardcopy anthologies. Sharon always intended to put out a yearly “best of” book, either through a shared revenue agreement with a small press or print-on-demand (with residuals to authors, of course). I’m not sure why that never happened. Lack of time, I suspect, or difficulty playing favorites. There was a general sense that we’d sell these eventual books in person at conventions, and not just through the website, but we didn’t go to conventions. No time, no money. Chicken and egg problem.
As far as other merchandise goes, I had an artist friend draw a series of six illustrations of the RE frog in classic genre situations: piloting a spaceship, dressed as a princess, dressed as a cowboy, dressed as a vampire, and so on. I thought we could turn them into mugs, t-shirts, and stickers—painlessly through a site like cafepress if we wanted. That never happened either. I’m not sure why. I think there might have been a computer crash with file loss, and embarrassment over telling the artist we needed another copy. Whatever happened, I lament that I don’t have a collectible mug.
The Wilds of the Internet
Although RE was an e-zine, it behaved in many ways like a print magazine, for better or for worse. An editorial split early on was the choice of black text on a white background; Sharon thinks that’s the easiest thing to read on a screen and I think it makes the screen bright and painful (I say as I type into a black-on-white Word document).
We were late in the game when it came to interlinking stories; at the beginning, if you liked a story and wanted to find more in that genre, you couldn’t; you had to go through each issue by date. As a temporary crutch, I added a section to our archive page which indexed stories by genre, and eventually we moved to a system where each story was tagged with its genre and they all linked to each other.
I would have liked to implement an “if you liked this story, read this story” link at the bottom of each piece, parallel to the way it’s handled in our book reviews, but usually Sharon was too tired by the time she had stories up; she is not at all a night person, and has trouble staying awake after 9 pm, whereas authors routinely ignored deadlines and squeaked things in at midnight. I do not exclude myself from the group that does this. And since fiction was her area, I wouldn’t have read any of the stories yet, even in their early drafts, and thus could not make recommendations.
Another thing I would have liked to see was more interactivity. Not a message board necessarily—Sharon would never have allowed anything that might have opened the door to trolling, and in this case I agree—but a “letter to the editor” page. It always struck me as strange that we didn’t have one; it would have allowed us to answer reader questions, and our background in the fandom community means we’re especially aware of how much authors appreciate feedback. I think Sharon was afraid someone would say something controversial, which confuses me because we’d decide which letters to publish. It may have ultimately been another question of “too much work”—yet another slush pile to go through.
Aside from our lack of funding, I’d say our biggest problem was how few people knew we existed, even when we were regularly publishing interviews with big-name authors and stories and articles by well-regarded up-and-comers. We should have been suggesting our authors for genre-wide Year’s Best anthologies, and we should have been a more visible presence in the community outside our website borders. Here again, I’d say the issue was a combination of lack of time and Sharon’s health.
I don’t want to make Sharon sound frail—she’s a runner and blue belt who lifts weights—but she’s never had an easy time relying on her body. Kidney problems, asthma, TMJ, a generally weak immune system, and a constellation of other residual illnesses meant that whenever she had time and money saved up to go to a convention and mingle with unfamiliar readers and editors, she’d get desperately ill, have to spend the money on hospital visits, and need to use the time off to heal up.
I’m sure working the full time job plus RE plus the overtime to pay for RE didn’t do her any favors there. It’s a big part of why I kept pushing to make the magazine profitable; I hoped that would mean she could cut back hours at her day job, and maybe have time and money to travel and see the people she admired so much. And after every health scare, I asked Sharon whether she’d consider shutting the magazine down, even though I love it; she eventually decided to cut back to a lighter publishing schedule. And then, recently, she agreed with me that it was time to stop, because it’s been six years of being sick all the time, working crazy hours with all the money going to magazine costs and medical bills, putting off having children, and not having time to write anything of her own.
Maybe a few years down the road, when she’s had time to collect her energy, RE will come blazing back—I’d like to think with real funding—or maybe this is the end. I am sure Sharon and I will continue to participate in the speculative fiction community as authors and readers, and likely as editors.
RE and Me
There are a few stories and articles that stuck with me not for their content but for the way they interacted with or reflected my personal life at the time. In chronological order:
“Writer’s Block” was the first article I edited for RE—the piece thrust at me hours before deadline with an “Oh, please, God, can you deal with this” that promoted me from “occasional writer of articles here to make coffee” to Associate Editor. It’s also the worst job I’ve ever done as an editor, and I wish I could take it back.
Basically, Sharon had commissioned the article from someone who wrote in a much more academic style than the one Sharon wanted for RE, and who espoused a very different point of view than Sharon wanted for RE. And, as could probably be predicted with an article from someone who had spent a lot of time thinking about writer’s block, it came in way after deadline and right before the issue had to go up. I should say here that this was a good writer, although this was not her best work, and I can understand why Sharon asked her to write this piece, although from a certain point of view the potential pitfalls should have been visible to both of them.
In the hours before the site went live, I basically ghostwrote the piece, changing almost every sentence and cutting whole paragraphs. By the time it was finished, I didn’t like the article because it wasn’t like anything I’d write, and the writer hated the article because it wasn’t anything like she’d write. She and Sharon agreed that we’d pay her but publish the story without her name on it. The writer wanted my name on it, but it wasn’t mine either. It ended a friendly acquaintance between us.
It was early days and we were tired and panicked, but I should have known better anyway. I don’t feel right about what happened, and don’t think I ever will; what I did went directly against the ethics I set out in an article of mine in the same issue, “How to Edit a Story (In a Way that is Helpful to the Author).” If it happened again, I’d just pull the story, or push it back an issue or two to work through edits with the author. We’re a website; it’s not like we have to fill a certain number of column inches. And I write fast enough that I can always come up with filler. At the time, with the quick promotion, I guess I didn’t remember I had that power; I was just thinking “complete the task you have been given, which is make this article work in three hours.”
“Aliens at the Office Christmas Party: How to Write Subtle Discrimination” was something I wrote based largely on diversity training materials by Tasnim Benhalim…who was impressed enough by the way I applied them to speculative fiction situations that she hired me for freelance work. And still does. I recently finished helping her write course materials to help government scientists present their findings to multi-national audiences. As for the article, it’s been anthologized in Crimethink: Politics and Speculative Fiction, sales of which benefit Doctors Without Borders.
“The Zetar Hypothesis,” by David Bartell is one of my favorite things we’ve ever published. I think it might be the apex of my goals for the nonfiction section. Where else but RE are you going to find a discussion by a scuba divemaster of whether a hyperbaric chamber could be used to dislodge an alien light being from a Star Trek character, and better science fiction applications for the technology? I could read this stuff all day. It is someone speculating about science and applying it to fiction.
I like to think there is one person out there for whom this article has been incredibly useful. For a short story I wrote last year, I had to do a lot of research to figure out what it would feel like to be burned alive, a subject for which there are no primary sources; ultimately I had to make a best guess based on conflicting hypotheses. Staff writer Ciro Faienza went through the same ordeal when he needed to find out what would happen to a group of astronauts if their capsule rapidly decompressed into the vacuum of space.
This happens all the time in genre fiction, and for some reason the scientific community does not think it is where they need to target their research. I mean, they can’t even agree on what would happen if you stuck your hand in the Large Hadron Collider. Get with it, scientists.
The book review of Mélusine, by Sarah Monette, caused a bit of a fandom wank, largely led by the writer who was still mad at me for the “Writer’s Block” article, and backed up by Elizabeth Bear, a friend of Sarah Monette whose book I had reviewed favorably in the same issue, and who therefore needed to make clear who she liked better. (Sarah Monette stayed out of it, to her credit, although I believe it knocked Sharon out of her social circle.)
I don’t really know how this affected anyone other than me and Sharon; it may have been unnoticed by everyone else, or it may have driven some people away who would otherwise have published with us. The upshot was that I was a hack, hated everything, had no soul, and the other things one says about a critic with whom one disagrees. Sharon was flustered enough that she added an apologia to the review, which made me incredibly angry, because I absolutely stand by what I said and she’d signed off on it.
I was not allowed to defend myself or the review in any way, mainly because Sharon believed that a total lack of response was the best way to make it go away quickly. And it did go away quickly, but it meant I stopped writing fiction for two years because I didn’t want to put anything in front of an audience I couldn’t see unless I was sure it was backed up with facts. I still document my work like crazy to make sure I can explain every choice, always. Ultimately, it’s made me a better teacher, and it gives me credibility when I present work at museums, but it didn’t come without a cost.
Almost a year later, I changed my review style, as reflected in the book review of His Majesty’s Dragon, by Naomi Novik. I went with something shorter and more gimmicky as an experiment to see if there was a way to differentiate the book review section and give it an unmistakable brand identity.
I thought the brevity and humor would play better on the Internet, and it was easier to write, particularly because a lot of the review copies we were getting then were too flimsy to stand up to a New York Times analysis. I liked a lot of them, but they were beach books. And when it comes to books like Echelon, what can one say but Crystal Pepsi? I wish I’d had this format back when I was reviewing The Traveler, by John Twelve Hawks.
At the time, I was questioning the importance of book reviews, and wondering how many people cared about that kind of criticism, and who it was useful to. It’s something I continue to ponder; I think about the old Cahiers du Cinema policy of not allowing anyone to review a movie they don’t like, which is interesting if you think the purpose of reviews is to draw your attention to works worthy of notice. Then again, I’ve learned a lot from reading thoughtful considerations of why certain pieces of fiction don’t work; in some cases, it’s brought me closure when I knew something was nagging me but I couldn’t place what. Roger Ebert’s perspective on criticism has been an influence.
Ultimately, I came to the conclusion that I liked reading the reviews and Sharon liked reading the reviews, and what else can one really go on? And ultimately I returned to the old review style, since by then the books I was reading were dense enough to hold up to it.
The other review that meant something to me was for The Gaze, by Elif Shafak, because I was reading it my first month at a graduate-level-only international film school, and it made people think I was really hip, when the only reason I knew about it was that Sharon handed it to me as an assignment. And I think the only reason she knew about it was that the publisher sent her a copy. It felt very industry and insider.
During the six years of RE, I’ve divorced and remarried (to staff writer Ciro Faienza), gone to graduate school, accrued a lot of student debt, traveled to at least three countries, qualified for citizenship in another country, written a novel, directed a feature film, started and folded two companies, written and recorded music including a song based on the Mélusine review flap, starred in a few stage and film performances, and become a respected enough filmmaker that I still can’t make a living off it but do get to show my work in internationally recognized museums and give lectures about it. It’s been a time.
Sharon Dodge, Editor-in-Chief: The Origins, Business, and Heart of RE
In the fall of 2004, I was unemployed. With no job on the horizon, I decided to try something relatively popular amongst people who fancied themselves writer-editors in 2004: start an online magazine (then called an e-zine, a term dying in popularity now). Reflection’s Edge was born. While it’s impossible to completely detail the experience, here’s my attempt to summarize what I learned over the course of my six exhilarating years as Editor-in-Chief.
The Business of RE
In the first couple of years, I learned some hard lessons fast. My record keeping, always fairly strong, became exceptionally detailed and exceptionally clear—because it had to be. Creating extensive documentation to track our work cycle, as well as creating forms for all our basic processes, made the business of running the magazine not only easier for me, but for my staff and our contributors. Still, it was rocky at first.
Thankfully, while I was learning how to actually run a business, I had (literary) friends. The night before publication on early Reflection’s Edge issues reminded me of “paste-up” nights from my high school newspaper days, with a crowd joining in as much for the fellowship as to actually assist in making the publication. But realistically, these friends weren’t even on staff, and I couldn’t call on them indefinitely. I needed a larger, permanent, and trained staff.
The problem was the “permanent” part. Some of our most talented, enthusiastic staff members dropped out with barely a week’s notice—and some with no notice at all, disappearing in the wind. This was a particular issue with advertising/PR hires. In fact, I can personally assure you that for a magazine of our size, it takes about 120 hours to put out each issue, because I have done it. (Of course, that was in the old format—it would have taken me notably less time in WordPress.)
What else wasn’t working? Amusingly, one of my biggest problems in the first couple of years was just that I wasn’t expecting problems, or at least not long-term problems like the health issues I ran into. While the health issues eventually came under control, unfortunately, they cost us several issues. (To this day I wince thinking of a review I read labeling RE as unreliable.) Still, I learned from that, and the longer I went, the more I accepted worst-case scenario planning as the way to prepare.
Perhaps most critically, my own professional development took time. Knowing how to define expectations is vital, as is confidence in your own work, and that kind of management takes a lot of experience. Once I had it, the magazine was phenomenally easier to run, but it didn’t come easy. Here’s a classic example of a problem I ran into early on. When I said I appreciated someone’s time and I knew I was only a small magazine, my deadlines often went unnoticed. When I said I appreciated someone’s time and carefully outlined expectations prior to any engagement, people were assured of my professionalism—and those who didn’t really want to make such a commitment were able to quickly realize that I meant business and get out faster.
Editing
Editing is an art. When done right, you gently show an author how to improve his work and make it a well-organized, grammatically coherent, beautifully paced story of appropriate length with spelling and punctuation tailored to the target audience (British, American, etc.).
Unfortunately, I didn’t do any of that in the beginning. My ignorance, lack of support staff, and constant deadlines (we started with a twelve-issue per year pace) created an overwhelming tension. I was too harsh, demanded too many changes, and explained too little. It didn’t help that I foolishly tried to do all the pre-reading at first, too. (Try stopping and reading one short story right now. Now imagine doing that between two and twenty times a day, every day, for the next year.) Eventually (thankfully), I learned to adapt, both by developing a supportive staff and by learning to let go of perfection when things fell through.
One of the more unfortunate occurrences during RE’s existence was that, just as I was beginning to make serious contacts in the publishing world and gain confidence as an editor, the Mélusine debacle occurred. I handled it badly from beginning to end, and succeeded in losing the friendship of two great authors and the confidence of my Associate Editor and best friend. Several others dropped my acquaintance as a result, and I never went to another writers’ convention during my tenure at RE. It broke my confidence for a long time. Eventually, of course, I got over it, and it was a good lesson, but I still wish I had prevented it.
Oddly, my biggest editorial regret is a strangely indirect one that involves a review I wrote. In short, I wrote a painfully harsh book review of Michael McCarty’s short story collection, Dark Duets: Musical Mayhem, when I was lacking active staff. I still don’t like the collection, but I had no call to brutalize the book as I did. I feel doubly sorry as he was unfailingly polite and professional in working with me over the years. The editorial part of that regret? Well, as a writer, the decision to write such a review was bad enough. As an editor, publishing that review was atrocious.
As with any job, you learn with experience. I’d like to think that by the end I was the kind of editor writers want: my goal was to alter a story as little as possible while still improving it, to make sure authors understood why I made suggested changes, to research everything, and to always listen to feedback on why suggested changes might not work. I’ve also learned to think long-term, and to be tougher under fire. But it’s the kind of understanding that takes a lot of experience and a lot of work. The truth is, experience as a staff member is a nice bonus. Experience as an Editor-in-Chief is everything.
Funding
While it wasn’t the only problem, what probably put the nail in RE’s coffin was that, despite early success with Amazon click-through links, by 2009 there was hardly a penny coming in. We also experimented with various PR hires (who quit), artistic merchandise (I honestly don’t even remember what happened), and at one point with paid advertisements (we had less than a half-dozen cheap ads placed, and I killed the section when we went to our new look). Soon, RE was solely funded by my pocket—an increasingly untenable situation. I had never enjoyed the financial or advertising side of the business; my focus, for good or bad, was on the edits, the relationships with the authors themselves, and, to a lesser extent, the functionality of the website. I had never found a lasting partner to balance the advertising and PR side of the load, and it was showing.
I should note that Romie pushed me to go nonprofit for years. I have never had any doubt she was right; I just literally couldn’t find the time to do it (or maybe I just avoided it—the process overwhelmed me—or couldn’t believe I could find board members who would stick around). I probably also should have taken a lighter stance on advertisements in order to keep us afloat, or better yet, wrangled a deal with a book publisher for support. The truth is funding was never my forte, and it just wasn’t high enough on my priorities until it was too late.
Staff
We’ve had many short-term staffers in and out the door; Patrick Dempsey (no, not that one), Shennandoah Diaz, Kyle White, Matt Switliski, Dave Klecha, Amy Brozio-Andrews, Chad Banks, Nathan Dodge, and “slush monkey” in particular were hard workers who made lasting contributions. A special thank-you is also owed to LeAnne Kilgore; though her contribution was finite, it had lasting effect. Her photography (pro-rated for the cause) defined our first layout with that charming image of a frog examining its reflection, and for years we were the prettiest magazine around.
I’d also like to make a few special notes about our pre-readers. Least-celebrated, but probably most fundamental to any literary magazine, pre-readers are our rocks. Our anonymous “Slush Monkey” spoiled me rotten with her rock-solid reliability and professionalism during her tenure; when she left due to personal publishing success, I had several well-meaning pre-readers drop in and out, and I missed her terribly for almost two years. Thankfully, I finally took up an offer by a recently published author, Chad Banks, to help out a bit, and he turned into the most phenomenal pre-reader and feedback provider we’ve ever had. (God knows I wish I’d had his restraint and eloquence in my first year as an editor.) Most recently, it was Chad Banks and Nathan Dodge, another previous RE contributor, who enabled us to not only function, but thrive.
In terms of our long-term staff, Elyse Holladay has been RE’s sole technical staff for the entirety of its existence, and her work has been incredible. When I hired her, she was a poor college student willing to take on this enormous task for very little pay. I would have remembered her for that first layout alone, but to my surprise and delight she stuck around, taking any number of calls from me on technical problems at almost any hour of the day for six years running. I am, I admit, horrendously picky; I don’t know how she put up with me asking for so many fixes. We were so lucky to have her tremendous talent and long-term dedication on board.
There’s also the brilliant Deborah Lively, attorney. While her contribution isn’t visible on RE’s pages, she kept us functional. Her (unpaid, volunteer) assistance meant I was less afraid when I got threatening emails, was called a pedophile (we published a story about a prostitute once), or had various other exciting legal issues. She also helped me sort through such basics as contract-writing and the legality of email signatures. Despite her invisibility, without her, RE would have crashed and burned before it even began.
Finally, there’s Romie Stott. It would be impossible to detail how much her involvement has defined and influenced RE. The quality of her work speaks for itself, and I’m still awed by such articles as “World Building” and “Aliens at the Office Christmas Party: How to Write Subtle Discrimination.” I have never run into a problem she couldn’t fix. Everyone in the world should have someone utterly brilliant, uncompromising, and entirely in their corner, but let’s face it: most don’t. I did.
The only unfortunate part was that when Romie left, it took me a long time to get my feet back under me. Which isn’t to say she abandoned us; even during the years when she had formally stepped down, she was there. I’ll never forget when, a year after her departure, after putting up yet another issue almost entirely by myself, she wrote me to say she’d gone ahead and taken care of all the archival issues and fixed a few links since I seemed busy—a miserable, repetitive job that took hours in our old format. She wasn’t just RE’s backbone; she was its guardian angel.
RE and Me
(I shamelessly stole that title from Romie’s section.)
With all this whining, it would be easy to think I viewed RE solely as a business, and a stressful one at that. The truth is, it’s been my baby. I can’t tell you how incredibly exciting it is to work with a new, unknown author of extraordinary talent. Kevin McClintock’s Der Führer’s Bunker was like a bomb going off inside my head. And he seemed to be amazed to be published! Or what about the remarkable Nisi Shawl? I’d been a fan of hers long before her submission landed in my inbox, and I’ll flat out admit I jumped up and down when I saw she’d submitted. Meredith Schwarz wasn’t just a remarkable author; back when I was first learning to run the magazine, her gentle advice often headed me in the right direction (thank you, thank you, thank you). The delightfully charming Tabaré Alvarez, the ridiculously multi-talented and philanthropic Hanne Blank (I would give blood to see more of your fiction)—I could go on for hours. I was cheering for every author’s success, and so excited to be a small part of it. I honestly don’t know that anything can compare to the feeling of being an editor: sure, it’s tough, but it’s also tremendously fun.
Unfortunately, there’s the whole problem of running RE as a business—and the cost not just in money, but in time. Before Reflection’s Edge, I had many interests and regularly read two to three books a week as well as all my favorite literary magazines. Reflection’s Edge, to be honest, ended most of that. I also have a wonderful new husband, new dog, new garden, and new home, and I need more time to enjoy them. Finally, I miss writing. I’ve barely written journal entries, much less really written, in the past six years. I’m ready to go back to that.
For me, for all the issues you’ve read about above, it’s time to close up—at least for now. I assure you I’ll be keeping the site up; Reflection’s Edge is far too important to me to let it disappear. I hope you’ve enjoyed our magazine; despite all the difficulties, it’s the best thing I’ve ever been part of, and what I’m most proud of having done. To our thoughtful readers and writers everywhere, thank you for joining us in this wonderful experience. We’ve been honored.
How to Run an Online Magazine
I’m leaving out a million things, I’m sure, but these are things that I think of telling other would-be and current editors. From one editor to another, here’s my tips list.
- Get experience. Don’t recklessly jump into starting your own magazine without experience (if anyone even does that anymore). Even if you’ve run a staff before, work on a literary magazine before you try to run one.
- Learn basic html. You don’t need to know how to manipulate cascading style sheets, but you will need to know how to handle the basics.
- Create a financial plan. Know how much you can invest, when to bail out, and track your expenses like God is watching. If that’s not your forte, find someone to partner with who understands finance.
- Legally found your business and get your paperwork in order. Enough said.
- Find a PR guy. RE would have been much easier to run if we’d been better known and better staffed. Find someone who will get your name out there and find you advertisers. Running a literary magazine isn’t about making money, but you have to stay afloat.
- Create a style manual. Do you use the Oxford (or serial) comma? What is your take on sci-fi/science fiction/Sci-Fi? English grammar has its variations; decide now what yours are. And it goes without saying you should be able to diagram a sentence within an inch of its life; frustrated authors deserve to know why you’re killing their comma splices and why you’re adjusting their spelling to match your audience’s cultural experience (and for consistency in your magazine, of course).
- Create a contacts list. You need a list of who does what for how much and how often as well as how to reach them, preferably sortable.
- Get a lawyer. There are plenty of lawyers with an interest in philanthropy and literature; you might be surprised how easy this one is.
- Get good technical support. Your hard work can’t be seen if you’ve been hacked, virus-bombed, or just have a server down (all of which happened at RE).
- Do interviews for staff members. No matter how well recommended someone may be, do an interview before you bring someone on staff. Ask every hard question you can and share as much about your magazine’s process as your privacy policy permits. You need to know if they’ll fit, and they deserve to know your expectations and your pay rates (if any). This will pay off!
- Make contacts. You need some big names to draw folks in. Just keep in mind big names can also be medium names with loyal followings.
- Train your staff. It will take time and patience, sure, but ultimately experience isn’t really necessary. Someone with intelligence and real passion for your cause is worth a dozen people with experience and no interest. Just make sure you give them the tools to succeed.
- Get enough material before you start, and take it easy on yourself. It is very, very hard to put out an issue every month. Most literary magazines online are moving away from that format anyway; a story or article every other day or every three does a better job of keeping readers, and you can mix in blog entries for variety and to add content. Still, even if you aren’t working in issue form, ask yourself if you can really keep up with whatever pace you set. Better yet, set a pace slightly lower than what you figure on your worst day you could still put out.
- Google first. There is nothing more sickening than finding out an author you’re working with lied about publishing elsewhere first—or worse, may be plagiarizing. A quick Google saved RE from several publishing debacles of that nature, and it only takes a second.
- Track everything. Every story or article needs to be tracked through the process of submission, acceptance, contract delivery, contract signing, publication, and payment. You will also need to track vital processes every month to ensure they’re taken care of, including such extras as archival work, advertising, submitting to contests, ensuring people know what you’re publishing, updating your listings in writer’s listings, sending out emails to subscribers, etc. Excel charts are invaluable.
- Assume you will be hit by a bus tomorrow. Okay, it’s a bit dramatic, but you do need a process document detailing how you put out a magazine each month along with your contacts list and tracking charts, preferably accessible in their most updated forms on some kind of hidden webpage on your site. It needs to be accessible by whomever is your second in command at the very least. Don’t wait for emergencies to plan.
- Have fun. If you’re out there editing a literary magazine, I have no doubt you’re doing it for the love. I also know how hard you’re working. Remember to step back and enjoy it when you can.