January 5, 2015
New Year, New Adventures!
I have a certain fondness for backlists. I like to push back, as much as possible, against the trend towards literature as ephemera. It is sad when a book fails to outlive its author. It is sadder still when it is consigned to the blue bin if it fails to take off in its first year of life. The saddest of all, in my opinion, is the $0.99 ebook, designed to be read and deleted, leaving not even a dusty volume behind as artifact. If a book was worth reading ten years ago, it should be worth reading today.
For the same reason, I love the idea of reprints. Great stories should be remembered, read again, and re-introduced to new readers. Short fiction writers should see the same long tail for their work that mid-career novelists might. Old stories gain new meaning in recent contexts, if we can only spare the time to look back.
I am terribly pleased, then, that Apex Magazine has asked me to be their new (and first) Reprints Editor! Once per month, I’ll have the chance to find and dust off an older gem for inclusion in their subscriber edition. I will still be contributing Clavis Aurea, my short story review column, to these issues, so now you have two good Charlotte-related reasons to go subscribe, if you haven’t already.
Not a bad way for me to start 2015! I have a shiny, warm feeling about this year!
Congratulations! That’s a wonderful piece of news.
I’ve always found the idea of curing reprints to be somewhat intimidating, because there’s *so much* out there, and you have to find stories written for other publications that already match the tone of yours. Big balancing act.
For sure! I like to think of it as wading through slush, though, only where the slush pile is infinitely bigger and the stories in it are all amazing. 😉
Fabulous news, congrats! 😀
Are you open to suggestions?
ABSOLUTELY. Email me. 😉