Postmortem: Everybody Panic: The 2018 Fark Fiction Anthology

Brian Bander:

Now in our third year, the Fark Fiction anthology team has settled into a set of processes and systems that seem to work out reasonably well for our needs. I can imagine that what we do is somewhat opaque to most submitters, and we thought it might be a good idea to shed some light on what we do, and how we do it.

First and foremost: we’re not affiliated with Fark.com, Fark, Inc., or any other Fark affiliate, trademark, group, cabal, conspiracy, and/or therapy group. We’re a bunch of Fark.com posters who do this all as a volunteer effort. Each year, before starting up, I get in touch with Drew to give him a chance to veto our use of the Fark trademark or his name or anything, possibly by flinging an empty bourbon bottle at me as is assumed to be among in the finest traditions at Fark Corporate Center. Additionally, we always have at least one representative from Fark on our mailing lists to make sure we don’t go too far off the rails.

As an engineer by trade, I’m a firm believer in processes, and have set up a way of doing things that hopefully limits human error (although I manage) and streamlines our work as much as possible. The average submitter may not care about this, but anyone else considering setting up an operation might find this helpful. Also, if you are, god help you.

The FFA Process

As stated by out Terms and Conditions page, we require all submissions to be mailed to a specific account (submssions@farkfiction.net) as text in the body of the email. If you look around, you’ll note that almost no one accepts unsolicited attachments at all; this is to cut down the risk of viruses. If you sent me something as an attachment and I sent it back, asking for it in text, please don’t feel insulted; this isn’t unusual.

The submissions account is just a redirector to several other accounts; I swap out an archive account each year, so we can keep a clean record of everything that comes in for a year. Submissions also get forwarded to an editor’s account, from which I’ll pull them as they come in, hammer them into the working template and post them for the other editors to read.

The ‘working template’ is just a MS Word docx file with a few standardizations: single spaced, indented, title/submitter/genres/word count as a header, that sort of thing. I’ll usually do a quick pass to fix up anything really obvious, and to apply Chicago Manual of Style rules for ellipses and en or em-dashes or whatever. In later edit passes I’ll take more time, but the first is a quick effort.

This is important to remember: the first version of a story that the editors read will usually not get much cleanup. If you want everyone to get a good, strong first impression, make your submission as clean as you can get it! If you have questions about punctuation, word usage, or whatever, the weekly writer’s thread would be a good place to ask, or you can see what the Chicago Manual of Style says since that’s what we go by.

Repeating, because this is important: if an editor can’t read your story because the punctuation makes their eyes sting, they may not look too much further than that!

The submission will be anonymized as much as possible, with the only link to the submitter being the by-line; so if you send me a submission from your personal email account, and you want to be credited with your Fark handle instead of your name (we can do either, your call) the submission and supporting link will only include that byline.

Once the submission is ready to go, I’ll upload the docx to our super-secret Fark Fiction server, post a thread in a super-secret Google Group mailing list we have, with something like ‘[FFA2018 Submission] *title goes here*’ and a link to the story for download. I’ll also email the link back to the original submitter, so they can verify that I didn’t change anything significant, accidentally miss part of it, or just generally screw it up in any other way. If that turns out to be the case, I’ll update the docx with corrections.

At this point, the editors will read it, and weigh in with comments. A good entry will usually have a good bit of back-and-forth between us all. Comments may range from simple observations (“I didn’t understand why the Golden Spork was so important. Did I miss something?”) to in-depth edits and corrections.

After reading, the editors will put a score value from 1-10 in the Super-Secret Spreadsheet maintained each year by the indefatigable James Rosinus. The spreadsheet calculates an average score for each submission, along with running word counts and a few other things; a set of graphs shows us exactly where we are at by breaking entries down by genre, word counts, submission counts over time, etc.

When submissions close, we look at the final scores for each genre and pick a cutoff point that allows us to have an even balance of entries and word counts. If an entry could conceivably fit in either Science Fiction or Fantasy, it may get moved from on to the other based on total scores and submissions; we try to have approximately the same word count totals per tab without lowering our entry standards. There’s more art than science to this, really, but ultimately it comes down a judgement call: setting the cutoff point at an average score of 7.0 might give us 28K words for the Fantasy tab, and moving things around might allow us to go up to 7.5 for the Science Fiction tab and still have 26K or so. Of course, that works the opposite direction as well; if we’re short on entries a specific genre, the cutoff score may be reduced.

So, note to submitters: we accept up to three submissions per person, so making they cover a variety of genres, or could fit into multiple genres themselves, gives you a better chance of being selected!

Once the entries are selected, I send out emails to everyone who submitted, either telling them they’ve been accepted (and providing a link to a version of their submission which I’ve done a more detailed line edit pass on) or that they haven’t made it in, and possibly offer some comments from the editors as criticism to explain why the decision was made. Hopefully, the commentary from the rejection is useful; I know I hate form-letter rejections as much as the next person, having a stack of my own.

In the final production stages, I go back-and-forth with the selected submitters, allowing them to approve or reject any changes I make, and to offer any more changes they may have. Meanwhile, we’re working on the art, iterating on it on the mailing list.

When the final package of PFD and .mobi files are ready to be published, I’ll upload them to Amazon and CreateSpace and have the print and Kindle e-book versions published. At that point, barring any more unforeseen circumstances, we’ll put the books up for sale and be live.

What went right:

· We mostly knew what we were doing this year.

The first anthology we did—Heart of Farkness—was a comic circus of my flailing around, having literally no idea what I was doing or of what I didn’t even know. Thankfully, we had a successful published author with us (huge thanks, GRCooper) who guided me through the technical details of setting up a KDP account and what most of the terms meant, in addition to doing the heavy lifting on the PDF and .mobi sides. Unfortunately, once he’d done that work, he handed it to me and that’s where any problems came in. Any errors in that publishing are mine alone.

This year, the process was in place, and we had experience to draw on that made it much easier.

· We had excellent community support.

The first year you do something, it’s an experiment. By the third year, it’s an institution. This year we had a number of returning authors who’d spent the time between the last time and this writing their stories, or at least planning them. This showed in the quality of the entries. We also had excellent help from Fark, as well, as any time we approached a deadline I could get the thread crossposted to main for visibility with just a quick email. Huge thanks!

What went wrong:

· Strict adherence to process cost flexibility.

We had several entries that came in with time to spare, that could have been significantly improved if I’d managed a back-and-forth exchange with the submitters, passing comments from the editors. There were one or two cases where I did this, to the improvement of the entry, but many more that I should have done. In some cases, a story that could have been fixed up a bit would have crossed the threshold for selection.

Why didn’t this happen more? Time is one excuse, but the biggest concern I had was that I simply was worried about giving someone the impression that they’d been selected, before any decision had been made. I have not yet had to tell someone no, sorry, you didn’t actually make it in, and I hope I never have to. My fear was that by asking someone for rewrites might give them the impression that they’d made the cut, when really I was just trying to make that possible.

Ultimately, in several cases I simply told myself ‘Fuck it, this is the way we do things, and I’m not changing it’ even though it would have improved the outcome. This will change next year.

D. Paul Angel:

It was my pleasure to once again work with my fellow Fark Fiction Anthology editors on pulling this together. Toraque, aka Dear Leader, has done a great job already of documenting his process and thoughts on bringing this together. What I'd like to share then, is my own personal process and thoughts on the project.

When Toraque sends us a link to a new submission, I open it and email to my Kindle so it's easy for me to read the various submissions while commuting on the bus. After reading it I use my default 'Droid QuickMemo+ app to make notes about each submission and give it my initial score. I write out most of the notes as whole paragraphs so I can share them coherently with the other Editors. I also make sure to avoid reading any of the other Editor's comments before reading a story, and especially avoid looking at the story's scores to date. I want my first reading, and first impression, to be as fair and unbiased as possible.

After reading the story, giving it an initial score, and typing up my notes, I'll go back through and see what the other Editor's have said and how it's been scored. I will often readjust my final score after seeing what the other Editors have to say if they had perspectives and insights that I missed or didn't fully understand on my initial reading. I think it would be a great folly to have such a great group of articulate Editors only to ignore what they say.

It also turns out that my brain is rather adept at reading over difficulties, ignoring typos, and generally rolling with whatever rules of grammar the author may be utilizing. This does not seem to be the case with the other Editors who will more often than not have a list of typos and other issues they'll include with their overall thoughts. I'm lucky with just the thoughts! So I think it's important to see the shortcomings I may have missed on my first reading of a story and take it into account as well. By the same token, it's always nice to move my score up too in seeing a layer or depth that I missed the first time through.

While I'm not the best of editors whilst in "reading" mode, I'm pretty damn good at it when my goal is literally "Editing." For the first time this year I "adopted" a story that I really liked, but was in need help. I have only seriously edited non-fiction to date, and found maintaining the Author's "Voice" a unique but rewarding challenge in getting the story to level-up. I think (of course) it ultimately worked, and after reading Toraque's comments, I may very well try to do more of it in the future.

I can also say how much the other Editors have helped me with my stories too. Last year's entry went through an extensive re-write after submitting it. I was quite proud of it and thought that if it wasn't perfect, it was at least in flirting distance. HA! Was I wrong! But the bones were there and after trading emails with the group I saw where it was weak and made the necessary changes. That experience has helped me so much with my other writings too, as I've learned to not just accept, but embrace critique.

I'm very proud of the anthologies we have put out, and it all starts with the work of Toraque and the rest of our Editors behind the scenes. I'm also deeply impressed with the talent and creativity of our Fark community, most especially with our editors who are authors too. It has been a great pleasure in talking about each other’s works too and while I've never really had a desire to be part of a writer's group, the FFA folks are different. It is as close as you can get to raising a pint and arguing words- and I look forward to more of it again next year.

(And to my fellow Editors, I promise to more initial "editing" too!)

James Rosinus:

Nuts and Bolts

We use a Google.docs spreadsheet to track and score submissions. The spreadsheet grows and changes a little bit with each new edition of the anthology.

Currently the main sheet consists of a matrix of numbered rows with columns for: Title, Author, Date Submitted, Tab (genre), Word Count, Running Word Count Total, nine columns for the editors to use for scoring the works, Average Score, and an Accept/Veto column*. There are some additional columns for assigning editors and tracking editing progress but that seems to happen organically and we’ve never actually used them.

The first seven columns contain information on the submissions:

The remaining columns contain the editors’ scores, the final score and whether the submission was Accepted or Vetoed:

Not all editors review every submission and generally do not review their own submissions (thus the empty cells). Final scores are averaged on actual reviews. Empty cells do not negatively affect the score.

“Accepted” does not mean the submission necessarily will be included in the anthology, only that it has not been vetoed.

*Editors have the ability to veto a submission to which they particularly object, regardless of scores from other editors, by scoring “N” or “n” instead of a number. The veto is subject to review. Over the years a (very) few submissions have been vetoed but they were all too low scoring to be accepted anyway.

The second sheet contains a number of charts and graphs, specifically Ratings Range of Submissions, Word Count of Submissions, Submissions by Date, and Submissions by Tab Type.

The last sheet recaps the first but is used only after submissions have closed and been rated. It puts the full list of submissions in order from highest rated to lowest and highlights duplicate submissions from the same author. (Authors are allowed to submit up to three entries. Only one, at most, will be chosen.)

The final scored list (some columns have been removed to fit the page):

There are also pie charts on this sheet similar to the one on Sheet Two but showing the Tab distributions only of submissions that made the cut for inclusion in the anthology. This allows the chief editor to adjust the placement of stories that fall into multiple categories into underrepresented Tabs.

Future Changes

Quite a few submissions this year were categorized with multiple Tab designations, i.e., Fantasy/Horror or SF/Humor, etc.

To make it easier to place submissions in underrepresented Tabs, next year’s matrix will include two Tab columns, primary and secondary. All submissions should be assigned both a primary and secondary. Submissions which are “pure” in their category should be assigned the same Tab for both primary and secondary.

The never-used columns for assigning editors and tracking progress will be dropped.

Dawn Martinez-Byrne

When a new story appears, I quickly download it and get to work. Unlike a copy editor, who corrects things like typos, I look at the the overall structure of a story. Is the plot successful, or does it raise far more questions than it can answer? Does the story flow with nice, tight pacing, or does it meander all over the place? And if it does, is that due to the style of story, or does it indicate a story that needs to be rethought? Are the characters believeable, likeable (or not, as the case may be), and do they function well within the parameters of the story? What about dialog? Does it sound right for the character, or is it stilted, forced or wooden?

Once I've finished this, I look for other ways in which a story may be improved. Some don't need much more than a grammar screen. Others are total rewrites. Far too many stories raise questions that aren't answered, and while a mystery or two is fine, some stories leave me completely confused. Usually a few changes can fix these.

Probably one of the biggest issues we see is stories that just sort of end. There's no summation, no sense of finality, just the uneasy feeling that the author ran out of pixels. The Internet is more or less infinite, pixels are free, and we have a generous word cap; so take advantage of that and write out your story fully instead of ending it abruptly.

Every year I'm amazed by the quality of writing we see from Farkers. But whether we're seeing professional-quality work donated to charity or the first stumbling words of a novice, the breadth and depth of imagination, world-building and conceptualization is stunning. It makes reading and working on the Anthology one of the highlights of my year, and I'm sure the other editors feel the same way.

Genevieve Shapiro:

I try to read the story first, without looking at other editors’ comments, so as to be unbiased as possible. But I do enjoy then reading the other editors’ thoughts, the same way I like seeing that extra bit of surprise film after the movie ending credits roll.

I seem to have a chronic inability to pass over grammatical stuff and typos. I have tried to just read for story, but then I think “well, this will have to be fixed in the end anyway” so I make a note of it right then to save time.

However I feel that a lot of grammar “rules” are pretty flexible, since language is evolving around us. So I see my role as not so much as a gatekeeper but as a talking tree on the path of the adventurer-writer (ok, scenes from Labyrinth and LOTR are definitely playing out in my head now). I speak to the writer as she passes, and she can choose to listen or not.

Anyway, ‘tis fabulous indeed to get to see all the submissions — and we do get a wide variety. Neat to peek into people’s minds, and even neater to be part of a group that brings all those mind-peeks together into one purchasable product. We hope that removing the word “fark” from the title will help you when buying birthday and Christmas presents for your daintier relatives, but in the subtitle and the content we remain faithful to the unique quality that is fark.com.

The amount of time it takes me (and presumable each editor) is substantial, as it includes reading (preferably in one setting to be fair to the author), copying the wrong sentences, writing suggested corrections, and evaluating the general story, mailing all that to Brian, and figuring out a score. However, that time is peanuts compared to the time to Brian must take in reading and then incorporating our suggestions or not, communicating them to the authors, incorporating the authors’ changes, and keeping everything available online and up to date, and that includes several rounds of reading and editing for most stories. And throughout the process he is sensitive to the feelings of authors and editors alike, and maintains decorum and civility in what could be a painful or stressful process.