Editor Interview: Fish Publishing

Original new short work

Stinging Fly, Salt, Dedalus, Doghouse, MacSweeney's.

Roddy Doyle, Simon Mawer, Ronan Bennett, John Steinbeck, John Banville, Colum McCann, Tony Curtis (poet), Claire Kilroy, C. J. Sansom, Hilary Mantel, J. M. Coetze, Ian McEwan, Sebastian Barry, Molly McCloskey, Dermot Healy, Kurt Vonnegut, Philip O'Ceallaigh, David Mitchell, Mario Vargos Llosa.

The annual Fish Anthology publishes new short fiction, flash, memoir and poetry from all over the globe. The selection process is anonymous, and the judges are high calibre international writers. Publication in the Anthology provides a boost for new, aspiring writers.

Submit to other publications and contests as well. Obtain feedback wherever you can. Spend whatever time it takes to finish the work before submitting. Each word, image, phrase, is important - one bum word or sentence is like hitting a bump on the road in your car. Endings is where so many stories fail. If you can't find what is wrong with the ending, look back to the whole story, perhaps there is something wrong with character(s), and the way they form and influence the plot. Above all, don't be discouraged by not making the cut, and if you do, be very encouraged.

It is well crafted, complete, polished. It is entirely authentic within its own context. You forget that you are reading for a competition. You want to read more of the author's work.

With online submissions, is is usually submitting a document that we cannot open. The option is there to submit a PDF, but plenty of folks don't know what one is, or how to create one, so it's a problem that is hard to eradicate. There are so many variables, too, with different programs, servers, systems, that fixed formatting is a problem, unless the PDF option is taken.

The Fish competitions are all judged anonymously, so until the final judging is completed we only need the writer's name and email, which are filed separately from the submission. Cover letters are superfluous, as are any other details about the writer. When we need all of that, we email the writer requesting it.

Our instructions to our readers is to read all of every piece. Of course you can often tell in the first paragraph, or page or two, and some submissions may be read quicker than others, but every submission deserves to be read in its entirety.

Submissions that are long-listed are re-evaluated, and then again if short-listed. SPot-checks are done on submissions that do not make the lists.

At the short-list stage, I will confer with other editors about certain submissions. Sometimes I will leave a story or memoir for a day and come back to it. One can't read too many pieces in a day without fatigue setting in, so we allow as much time as possible. The days are spent reading, taking a break, reading, and conferring.