editing

Please stand by

/ Stephanie / Leave a comment

We had a whole heck of a lot of technical issues in the last couple of months. Now that those are fixed, we’ve been able to get the AMT contest judged and results posted, plus TCLJ 2015.3 is up. What it shows is how much work is behind a literary journal.

If we’ve promised contest results by a date and the date comes and goes, obviously something has happened. It’s not as if editors say, “Hey, let’s mess with these folks for a while.” Maybe an editor got sick or a life event happened. Maybe, as in this case, we had a technical glitch beyond our control. We do our best to let people know when we’re delayed and we always appreciate the patience displayed by authors. We’re also very lucky in the quality of work we get to read and I’ve found that behind quality work, there are quality people who understand that stuff happens.

We’re still catching up on articles, which shows just how far behind we got. But we’re out of the weeds, DOW is open, and we’re back on track.

Finalizing September

/ Stephanie / Leave a comment

I did my final reading early for TCLJ 2015.3 and I picked way too many pieces. It’s going to be hard to make an editor’s pick.

I found that there was a definite theme not just in what people submitted but in what appealed to me. The pieces I gravitated toward seemed to be about loss, promise, and time. So apparently that’s one way to get to me. I even had to give a “no” to pieces I liked. Overall, if everything I chose went in, it would be a beautifully-themed edition of the journal.

I’m eager to see what the other editors choose.

TCLJ 2015.2

/ Stephanie / Leave a comment

I love every issue of TCLJ and our latest is finally up (June is always a jam-packed month for us all). I did another Snark Zone, I helped to judge the Spring “Three Cheers and a Tiger” entries (that was a lot of fun), and I made an editor’s pick in addition to all the excellent pieces we had.

Sometimes the hardest part of making final choices is narrowing down my Editor Pick. It’s a piece that would be cut unless salvaged by a single editor. I chose “Fat Peanut” because it captured the Florida I know and each time I opened the story to reread it, I fell right back into it. For me, that’s always a good sign. If memory serves, I had three good pieces on my EP shortlist.

So if you submit something that makes first cut and ends up not getting in (whether it’s to TC or another journal), please don’t be discouraged. Yours may have been the heartbreaker I had to set aside simply because another submission touched something different in me on the day I made my choice.

Keep writing!