Editor Interview: Warrior Wisewoman

SF with female protag

Anybody who is willing and able to publish SF in this publishing economy - and especially anyone who thinks the word "midlist" is not a pejorative.

Jane Austen, Ursula LeGuin, C.J. Cherryh, Ellis Peters, P.D. James, Tony Hillerman

The stress on women making their own decisions and solving problems without resorting to hatred of men.

Read the previous volumes. Be patient, because we do have every intention of bringing out more volumes as soon as it is financially feasible.

A piece in which the characters are real; speak like people actually speak; face situations that are not manufactured, but arise naturally in the course of the story; and don't act stupidly. We like characters with brains.

Their antagonists (usually male) are thoughtless, cruel or power-hungry. We would rather not see one-dimensional villains.

We care most about the story itself.

Depends entirely on the piece. If it's clear from the first page or so that the author really can't write or hasn't read our guidelines, we can stop quickly. If the story grabs us and holds our interest, we read through to the end.

A story needs to "fit" with other stories that are likely to be part of the volume, so as to present to the reading public a more or less cohesive whole, without overlap or repetition. Sometimes stories can be about the same issue--e.g., a woman's response to war--as long as each story presents a different aspect or reaches a different conclusion.

Impossible to answer this question. If stories arrive, they go into a queue, and when enough time to read presents itself in the face of everything else going on, the queue gets accessed and reading begins. I don't do this full-time, and life often gets in the way.