Meaghan and I have far more editing experience in a workshop environment, and so when we passed drafts back and forth a few times for comments before going back to authors with suggestions, it felt a little like a time-shifted workshop. We’ve been editing stories since mid-February (so that’s about two and a half months of editing about two dozen stories, while working full-time jobs), and to account for this being experimental, we’ve been adding new strategies to our process as we go. We’ve also been editing in public, and that’s challenging. Contributors can try to guess from our project updates when they think they should have heard back from us — and as we treated each story differently, and put each through multiple rounds of edits before we ever went back to the author — it took some stories more time to settle then others.
But back to the difference between what we did and what other anthology editors — especially erotica anthology editors (which we are not, not really) do — I’ve only participated, as a writer, in three anthologies, but each time, I got so few edits back I felt as if I was just being copyedited. (I am not perfect. And definitely not that perfect. And for this, we hired a copyeditor for C&C.) But it’s maybe a helpful distinction, between curation (where one edits only by placement, proximity, context) and editing (where the editor, well, edits). I took my editing cues in C&C not from my anthology experience, but from my experience being edited once an hour in the blog mines — where I had to learn to write fast and without attachment. It’s my editorial opinion (oh god) that this painful, ego-cutting-up process made me far less precious about my words. I trusted my editors to hold me to a goal my ego as an artist sometimes got in the way of (a lot of the time gets in the way of) — communication, speaking directly, reaching a reader in a relatable way. I mean, this is my editor — and if he can’t wade through what I want to say, and he’s getting paid to do so, there’s a problem with my work. We all have trusted First Readers, and those should probably be close friends who will tell us how painfully brilliant we are at the same time as they hold us accountable to whatever standards we tell them matter to us in our work. But an editor’s job is to hold the writer to their own standards and their own vision.
And last — we may not have had a sexual agenda going into this book (how could we?) but we certainly had an agenda as writers. We didn’t try to bring any story into alignment with an agenda of what it should be “about,” but we did push stories in directions we think are important and need pushing to happen — to be more raw, to be less needy, to be more human about sex.
I’m looking over the edits and comments from Meaghan and Melissa on my Coming & Crying story, and this a great way to start the week:
ha, I love a good Zima motif.I’m glad that is such a UNIVERSAL SENTIMENT.
by melissa:
I hate paper cuts, but I love drawing a little blood when undoing staples. This is how I learned to publish anything, so it’s all I’ve got as a claim to anything at all punk rock. I only held a bass once, and the only instrument I ever learned was the clarinet. The closest thing I got to getting high was on rubber cement fumes, not any legitimately bad drugs. I actually paid for the zines I bought in Harvard Square. Stealing from girls is so wrong.
The first one I took apart had Jan Brady on the cover and it was called Teenage Gang Debs, and I guess it was the last issue. You could get it at this store on Mass Ave that also sold Xeroxed scripts for cult films and press photos of Kyle MacLachlan and Madonna and Italian movie posters as big as your bed and so in this way, it was like the internet, with a door that opened onto the street. I could not even pronounce the word “zine” when I bought one. That it was short for anything bigger was lost on me.
But I wanted to pull it apart and see how you did it. That was the first thing, after reading the story on Sassy and the pathologically accurate recaps of the last season of The Brady Bunch. I didn’t have any girl friends I could think to pass this on to. Taking it apart didn’t pain me any.
I laid each page out on my floor, and drew little sketches in my diary of how page 1 was backed with page 2, and then on the same sheet, page 23 and page 24. I reverse-indexed the whole thing. I ripped pages out of a notebook and taped them together in this order. I numbered the backs of them and scratched out the numbers when I got them wrong (which I did, a lot). I figured out that the images all came from photographs of television sets. Nothing in the layout was computerized at all, which was exciting: it meant I could do it with a typewriter (which I still had, the one I had since I was 8), and scissors, and cutting borders out in interesting ways to make negative space with only black and with white.
The Gang Debs reared their nostalgic head this weekend, in the form of a call-out in Marisa Meltzer’s Girl Power book. They were with me tonight when I called in the first quote for the production of the the book. I used a web form and drop downs and excited emails. My hands are subway dirty but that’s about it.
We were decorating our storyediting folders like 9th graders and trying to think of who we could ask to write our forward. “it’s on the tip of my tongue!” Melissa said from the couch. “me too!” I squealed and said I’d go look at my books for ideas and walked into my room.
“oh, Joan didion. That’s who I was thinking of,” she called after me. “oh yeah, ha me too.” “not gonna happen.” ” Oh. I was thinking of anais nin.” “ha. Dead.”
A quick bit of housekeeping:
- You keep writing us asking to pledge! This is ridiculously generous. Please know that we want to do this again, and it looks like you do, too? Meaghan and I are putting our (spinning) heads together on how to do this. One option worth revealing a little bit of now — if everyone who has told us they’ll get a story in by deadline actually does, we will have more stories than we could print in one book.
- Some textual snapshots of our party: Sasha Frere-Jones is not on Tumblr, Nic Rad posits that James Franco IS America, Chelsea Summers rocks a mean faux fur, two Katie West fans who met on an anti-XKCD (!) IRC channel met IRL for the first time in front of all of us, even in near pitch dark I sort of show up in Nikola’s Fauxlaroids, Halle Kiefer offered to stand in front of the first venue and usher folks on but we refused because we needed her HERE (hey-yo), Stephen Elliott came out in a puffy jacket and told a story about nosebleeds and also book tours, and I went home with Meaghan’s phone so when I checked into Foursquare this morning I Foursquared myself, and when Meaghan emailed to make a date to get the phone back she forwarded an email from one of our backers who told Dave Eggers about the book a few days ago, and god I should get back to work, and at this rate, Hendricks gin should be a project sponsor, too.
- Some of you seeking us out left voicemail for us on our secret party line, which I haven’t even listened to. But I have mp3s of them and I sort of want to post them. Speak now if that’s a terrible idea, you.
Sometimes, the internet can be amazing.
Good job, girls.