Freelance scribbler exploring worlds real and imagined
Jacob M. Appel 181 pages Black Lawrence Press (2016)
Read this if you like: Robert Olen Butler, Matthew Cheney, Juan Villoro
tl;dr summary: A study in the craft of writing short stories, with 10 stories that each have a different lesson to teach.
I recently finished watching the second season of Andor. If you don't know it, it's a TV show prequel to the Star Wars movie Rogue One, which takes place right before the events of A New Hope and focuses on the less-heralded members of the rebellion who put the pieces in place for Luke, Leia, Han, and crew to have their big victory. One of those characters is Cassian Andor, whose complete backstory is revealed over the two seasons of the show.
It took me a little bit to get into Andor, but once I did it's shot up my list of favorite Star Wars stories. I highly recommend it to anyone who hasn't watched it—but this post isn't about Andor as a show. I'm about to get way more pedantic and nerdy, because the first thing I thought of when I heard the name Cassian Andor was a different series I've loved since childhood: the Wheel of Time. In that world, Andor is a country, in fact the largest nation in the Wetlands and where most of the series' main characters were raised.
I always find it ironic that professional editing—an industry solely devoted to words and language—has so much confusing niche terminology. I say this as someone who edits professionally, both as a freelancer and through Scribble House. One person’s content editing might be another’s structural edits, and whether these are interchangeable or mean slightly different things usually depends on who you’re asking, too.
Part of the problem is that these terms aren’t standardized, and slightly different ones are often used depending on the context. What a fiction editor calls “line editing”, the editor of online news articles might call “copy editing”, and there’s similar overlap between terms like content editing, structural editing, and developmental editing.
Lately I've been reading Liza Dalby's The Tale of Murasaki, which is a bit of an outlier read for me. I don't often read historical fiction (though there are exceptions), and usually I like a bit more action in my plots—and I'll admit, there have been parts reading this book that I've itched for something to, you know, happen. But I find the content and context fascinating enough that it's kept me reading, albeit a bit slowly.
One of the reasons I picked up The Tale of Murasaki was to get some context for The Tale of Genji, which I made an aborted attempt to read a few months back. A bit of a mental shift is always necessary when reading something from so long ago, but I found Genji particularly opaque because much of the plot hinges on the rhythms and expectations of Japanese imperial court, a world foreign to me in just about every respect.
And I'm happy to report that The Tale of Murasaki makes an excellent bridge in that regard, bringing just enough of a western, modern sensibility to ground me in this world. In many respects, this kind of far-in-the-past setting requires the same attention to worldbuilding as a secondary world. Honestly, it's easier for me to picture how the world works in a future Earth setting like Star Trek than in 11th-century Japan, probably because a speculative future world is inevitably laced with the perspectives of the time it's written in. It can't fully spring from the substrate of the future because that culture doesn't yet exist, and we don't really know what will happen between now and the 24th century that will shape how people then think. With things that happened in the distant past, there is an established cultural context separate from our own, even if we no longer know or understand the full details of it.
Oliver K. Langmead 223 pages Titan Books (2024)
Read this if you like: novels-in-verse, Ursula K. LeGuin, Jeff VanderMeer
tl;dr summary: Colony ship engineer wakes from stasis to learn she slept through a war and is one of the few experts left to complete their mission.
I’m mostly a pantser when it comes to the writing process. Now and then I’ll know where a story’s going ahead of time, and may even do a bit of outlining for longer works, but my preferred approach is just to start writing and let the story tell me where it wants to go.
Because of this, my rough drafts don’t tend to be what I would call “finished stories.” They have a beginning, middle, and end (usually) but they still don’t have an effective arc, are riddled with inconsistencies, and have the kind of rambling pacing that feels like the author’s just making shit up as they go instead of intentionally moving from one scene to the next. Which makes sense, because that’s exactly what happened.
The editing process is when I wrangle these messy rough drafts into something other people can actually read and make sense of (and hopefully enjoy). I do have some help in this process because I have an incredible writing group. But even with a workshop group or beta reader, you can’t expect them to do all the heavy lifting for you. Most stories need to go through multiple editing rounds before they’re fully finished—more versions than you can realistically expect anyone else to read.
I’ve had some somewhat contradictory reading experiences of late. On the one hand, I’ve read several wonderful short stories in a fairy tale or folklore tone that inhabit a vague and floaty world in a beautiful way. On the other, I’ve written a few different feedbacks for After Happy Hour submissions where one of my major issues was a lack of grounding—that the world felt too floaty, to the point I couldn’t picture the world the characters were inhabiting.
The right level of worldbuilding and description is a tricky balance to strike for writers in any genre, and I think particularly so for those in speculative worlds. Not every type of story lends itself to lush, lengthy descriptions, either. In some modes, sparse details are a defining characteristic of the genre. Stories that stem from an oral storytelling tradition tend to fall into this category, which includes genres like folklore and fairy tales. Mythic voices give more flexibility for detailed descriptions, but even so it can break the effect to spend too many words grounding the reader. There are other genres that need this kind of deft hand, as well. Magical realism is one example—the rules of the world need to be established enough that the reader isn’t confused, but if you explain too much then it can lose the “magic” part of the name, or start to read like a different type of fantasy.
What's especially challenging about fairy tale writing is that a vaguely defined setting is a common genre trope. Fairy tales often take place somewhere “far away” and “once upon a time”, intentionally placed outside of a historical context. There are exceptions to this rule, of course, but the more solidly a story is tethered to reality, the less like a fairy tale it seems.
I took last week off from writing a blog because I was busy with stuff for both After Happy Hour and Scribble House—things like getting ready for the return of the Send It! group next week and wrapping up the Issue 27 reading period, but mostly finishing up a workshop I did yesterday through Chill Subs about common mistakes made by submitters. Doing that has made me think a bit more deeply than I usually do about why we reject work for After Happy Hour.
People have asked me this question before, of course, mostly during events like AWP or other conferences when I'm at the AHH table wearing my Managing Editor hat. I feel like they're usually a bit annoyed by my answer, because the truth is, the best way to get an acceptance from us is the same generic advice you get from every journal: Send us your best, read what we publish, follow our guidelines. And, yes, this is stuff every writer has heard before. But there's also a reason editors keep saying it over and over again: Almost everything that we reject at After Happy Hour, it's because the writer didn’t do one (or more) of those things.
Dorene O’Brien 156 pages Baobab Press (2019)
Read this if you like: Karen Russell, Carmen Maria Machado, quirky short fiction tl;dr summary: Collection of (mostly) literary stories in which characters hope, for better or worse (mostly worse).
I usually mostly enjoy being a freelancer—more than I've enjoyed any past jobs, if nothing else. Even so, there are those days that it just feels like a personal affront that it's 2025 and we still have to work for a living. No matter what you do for money, there are times that it's just a grind.
And I get why a lot of writers neglect work in their stories. If you're the kind of person who writes (or reads) as an escape, then your job is probably one of the primary things you want to escape from. It already sucks up 40+ of your hours every week. Does it really need to take up real estate in your creative writing, too?