Taglines, Bios, and Teamwork

Hello, my dear faithful readers. Thank you for hanging around despite my silence. The month has been a bit of a blur for me. First, it was the flu… Okay, there’s still a couple of annoying symptoms -- a slight cough and a tendency to get tired easier than normal -- hanging around… I really hate being sick. It’s an inconvenience. It wouldn’t be half so bad if the virus or bacteria or whatever it is would give the host the common courtesy of calling in advance and scheduling a time that is convenient for everyone. But no… the little germs just crash through the front door whenever they feel like it and then they don’t leave. Of course, being me, I also hate the lack of control I feel when I’m sick. It’s the idea that I’m not in command of my own body. It just does what it wants to do, regardless of what I want or what I will it to do. And then, my silence was forced to continue because ever since, I’ve been playing catch-up. I hate playing catch-up, too, always running from place to place, trying to get everything done that should have been finished weeks ago.

I was going to blog about evaluating manuscripts today, about how to judge the quality of your own writing to determine whether or not you really should aim for that top paying market or let it go to somewhere lower. After all, everything we write is not golden, is it? However, I’ve spent the last few days playing with taglines and author bios and doing the final copyedit for The Alchemist Review, so I thought I’d write about that instead.

Taglines have been interesting. They’re important in a periodical publication. They give the reader an idea of what a story or poem is about. They make the reader want to flip to that page of the journal or the magazine and read that particular piece, but they can’t give away any twists that the author uses. In short, they’re vital and they’re hard to write. As a result, my Assistant Editor and I did them together. He started writing them and sent them to me. Some I liked. Some I didn’t. So I rewrote the ones I didn’t and sent them back to him. After a couple of days of this, we decided to meet at a coffee shop… except we forgot it was Easter Sunday and the coffee shop was closed, so we ended up at a Chinese restaurant, drinking tea and eating eggrolls and going back and forth over. It turned out that there were only four that we really disagreed on and we were able to work out a compromise fairly easily. It’s good to have people who are work well together on a team. So, after two hours, we had taglines for the six fiction pieces and eight poems that we’re publishing. We decided that the titles of the three non-fiction pieces spoke for themselves and, of course, we didn’t do taglines for the artwork.

Bios were something else again. I had to track down twenty-two of those. Most of them were sent to me right away, but there were the people who insisted on going over the word count I asked them to keep to… And we’re not talking by just a word or two either. One guy sent me a bullet list of his life’s events and suggested that I should be able to write something from it. Fortunately, he’d had an interesting life. The only one that truly had me banging my head was the one who insisted he had already turned it in. Okay. That’s nice, but I no longer seemed to have it. Could he please resend it to me? Turns out, he’d never sent it to me, but had sent it to another staff member instead. Just a word of friendly advice, if an editor asks you for something, even if you’re fairly certain you’ve already sent it, just send it again rather than making them dig for it, especially if you have it fairly handy and they’re asking for it. They’ve probably had a rare human moment and misplaced it, or else the cyber-gods interfered and they never received it.

I remember one of the first articles I’d had published. The editor contacted me two or three times to ask me to resend it to her. I was starting to panic, thinking it wasn’t going through. She assured me that it had, that she just couldn’t find it. I, of course, resent it each and every time, but I was starting to wonder about her and her organization abilities, etc. These days, I’m much more understanding of what she was going through and wouldn’t think twice about sending something multiple times if asked. There’s just so much that goes on behind the scenes. It’s chaos. And it all has to be done at once. Now. Immediately. It’s details that most writers, unless they’d served behind the scenes in some capacity, wouldn’t have much idea about.

There are those who say that every writer should read slush at least once. Personally, I think every writer should serve on an editorial staff at least once. I think it’s important to experience the little details, the other side of the fence, so that we can develop a mutual respect for one another’s tasks in the publishing process and work together as a team that much better.