Buying into a personal mythology of hierarchical status can harm your career. It’s one thing to expect respect for your work and experience. It’s quite another to expect demonstrations of your status or to make pronouncements like “I will not attend any conventions at which I am not a guest of honor.”
The energy for my money is all with publishers like Small Beer, Dalkey Archive Press, Aqueduct Press, Coffeehouse Press, and places like that. Strong, committed independents willing to take a chance on great, hard-to-classify material.
The truth is working on an anthology is like an obsession to me, and the more difficult the execution of the idea or focus, the more I become locked in on it to the exclusion of all else.
I never imagined that my love of reading and editing would bring me to this point. I just wanted to share the stories that excite me with as many people as possible.
The Weird, as opposed to horror or dark fantasy, has a slippery quality of “you know it when you read it,” with an element of terror, perhaps, but more likely unease.
