Editor Interview: The Fabulist

Fables, yarns & tales.

Strange Horizons, Tachyon Publications, PM Press, Manic D Press, Shareable Magazine, Dark Horse Comics, Lightspeed, Interzone, Image Comics, Netflix (as a story cultivator and curator), Tor ... we also love the output of mainstream publishers of genre and New Wave works from the '60s and '70s, and the great indie comics publishers of the '80s and '90s, such as Eclipse and First.

Writers and other creative artists who inspire us include: Douglas Adams, Margaret Atwood, Francis Bacon (the artist), J.G. Ballard, Iain M. Banks, L. Frank Baum, William Blake, James P. Blaylock, Alfred Bester, Ray Bradbury, Pieter Breughel (Elder and Younger), Octavia E. Butler, Italo Calvino, the utopian muralist Mona Caron, Angela Carter, Guy Davis, Charles Dodgson, D’Aulaire’s Greek and Norse mythologies, Samuel R. Delany, Philip K. Dick, Colleen Doran, Lord Dunsany, Electric Velocipede, Harlan Ellison, Neil Gaiman, Gabriel Garcia-Marquez, Nikolai Gogol, Gong, Goya, Hawkwind, Robyn Hitchock, Robert Hunter, The Inklings, Diana Wynne Jones, Jack Kirby, Damon Knight, R.A. Lafferty, Ursula LeGuin, Mr. Lovecraft, China Mieville, Mike Mignola, Hayao Miyazaki, Michael Moorcock, John R. Neill, Pearls Before Swine, Arturo Perez-Reverte, Philip Pullman, Arthur Rackham, Robert Silverberg, Dan Simmons, Cordwainer Smith, Fiona Staples, Theodore Sturgeon, street art, Sir John Tenniel, James Tiptree Jr., Van Gogh, Brian K. Vaughn, Robert Wyatt, Roger Zelazny, science fiction’s New Wave, and a universe of folklore and mythology.

The Fabulist is committed to supporting fantastical literature and art in all its variations, but is not a genre publication per se. This keeps our opportunities really open, but also puts us in a funny sort of place in that we don't actually get a lot of hard-genre submissions, which is too bad, because we love such works. (We are considering doing a more determined call for hard-genre works in the future.) In general, we don't view genre as an end in itself, but rather a station along the way that one may or may not stop at. No matter the form and style, a given work should embrace its possibilities with vigor and imagination, and always to the purpose of illuminating or revealing the human condition in one way or another.
We also have started publishing nonfiction related to fantastical themes in fiction, poetry, art, film and video, etc. We intend by this to build a very well-rounded offering for a wide range of readers with overlapping interests.

Read what we've published. Proofread and spellcheck. ***Include your contact info IN the ms.*** Write about people, their passions, their conditions and circumstances, their peaks and valleys, their complexities and quirks, their confusion and clarity, their diverse sentiments, their desires and frustrations, and their transitions, transformations and transfigurations. We love that stuff. Write in a manner that illuminates, provokes, challenges, comforts, amuses, delights and rewards. We are not usually interested in work that is merely grammatically correct and technically well-written, but that doesn't transcend the cliches of the genre. This includes stories that transpose cliches of the fantastic into cliches of the mundane, e.g., another night on the job for the elf chief of police at the county jail for mythical perps, etc. AND YET: If your fantastical fable, yarn or tale is just plain awesome, regardless of cliche, we'll want to run it.

Clean copy. Thoughtful and compelling characterizations. Vivid setting as appropriate. Worthy writing, whether it's spare or ornate. Some element of the fantastical. Some revelation of the human condition. Most of all, exceptional storytelling.

You can tell when someone is using a "shotgun approach" and submitting as widely and indiscriminately as possible. It's a drag. Please take the time to know the publication you're submitting to. We get definitively non-fantastical works in the submissions queue more often than we'd like, and it's just a waste of precious time. Also, please run the spellchecker before submitting.

Succinct cover letters and a one-paragraph professional bio are fine. Attached CVs are fine, but not necessary.

We try to read the whole thing, but often end up skimming, seeing how it ends, and then revisiting if we are inspired. It sometimes takes multiple reads over many months to complete the review process.

We have a small group of peers who share in the reviewing process. I have learned that my own taste and judgment around a given story is far from adequate; my colleagues have chosen works that I'd never considered, and which went on to do really well for our publication and the author. This is one reason why reviewing submissions can take a long time with us. We want to make sure the right people are reading a given submission.

We are moving to a weekly publication schedule, and have creative works scheduled for every Friday for the remainder of 2020. So, much of the coming months will be spent preparing each manuscript — proofing it, getting final approval from the author, getting the art set up, entering the story in our content management system, creating an author page w/ photo and bio, etc. We will be running open calls for poetry and visual art as well; these categories each have their own editor or director. We probably won't be opening up a new open call for fiction until this fall or winter. We find reviewing submissions to be arduous as we get a huge number of manuscripts, and want to account for differences in taste when reviewing them. This slows things down as finding readers we consider qualified for our pages — and who also have the time to review manuscripts in bulk — is challenging.

We make editorial suggestions aimed at clarifying, and we correct spelling and grammar. We check with the author to make sure we understand their intention and are able to preserve their artistic integrity. We have found that asking for revisions is very problematic as an author can earnestly revise, and still produce something we're not able to run.

Yes, though it's a lot to keep up with!