Bewildering Stories News

Jerry Wright is traveling. His editorial and book review may appear later this week or next week. Please stay tuned.

I Submitted to a Bureaucrat from Outer Space

I don’t know whether the title is more or less scary than that of Steven Utley’s fondly remembered film I Married a Monster from Outer Space. But it seemed like a catchy lead-in to a question: Does Bewildering Stories practice “literature by committee”? Do contributors think they’re marrying — or at least flirting with — a bureaucratic monster from outer space? If they did, it would be a very far-out misperception: we’re really quite down to earth.

A few facts may come as a surprise:

Ye Editor (publisher Jerry Wright) is the first person to read submissions; Ye Copy Editor (i.e. me) is normally the last to read them before a decision is made.
Between Jerry Wright, the three review editors and myself, only one “yes” vote is needed to accept a submission.
Jerry almost always forwards files to me and the review editors with a noncommital, one-line comment. Since I’m busy with e-mail and formatting, I seldom read the files immediately. That means the review editors’ work is very important.

How does it work out in practice?

If there’s a difference of opinion, so much the better. The submission can be accepted and the debate can continue in a Challenge or the Critics’ Corner, where anything in Bewildering Stories is a fit topic for discussion, and readers and contributors alike are invited to join in.
Absent a single “yes” vote, I read the submission and confer with everybody else. Since Jerry screens submissions to make sure they don’t overstep one of our few essential esthetics guidelines, outright rejections are rare at this point.

What’s the upshot of our procedure? We give our contributors the benefit of the doubt. And when there’s too much doubt or we think we have an idea the author can use to great advantage, we try to help as best we can. Together, we do what a lone editor might try to do anyway, and we don’t think any one person has a corner on all the ideas there are.

Some authors prefer that a single editor read their works. That’s not always good, witness Danielle Parker’s experience:

After some of the non-responses I have received from paying markets — including one who responded with personal attention at last: "Your story was so boring I couldn't get past the first page" (I think it was the Galen story) — I think our responses (Don’s, most of the time) are outta this world “better.”

Well, thank you, Danielle... You have to wonder about the stability, let alone the judgment, of anyone who’d write such a rude letter. And as everyone ought to know, our opinion of “Galen the Deathless” is quite the opposite!

Sometimes contributors need to withdraw a story. That happens more often than you might think. When we get such a request, our standard response is something like, “No problem, best of luck, and please let us know if we can print your story at some other time.”

Now, compare that to the experience of one of our contributors who innocently withdrew a story from a paying webzine, no less, since we’d accepted it first. The editor’s response was a four-motored snark to the effect: “Our seven reviewers have carefully read and voted on your story, and countless other contributors have been disappointed all because of you ! You have left our editorial process a smoking hole in the ground ! You are banned. Begone!”

Now that’s bureaucracy for you, and it belongs in some galaxy or other far, far away. At Bewildering Stories we have a much simpler procedure: we talk to each other and our contributors. It’s our way of keeping our feet on the ground.