Editor Interview: Orion's Belt

intimate, enigmatic tales

I adore other publications that commit themselves to publishing literary speculative fiction that's bold and experimental. My favorites would probably be Strange Horizons and Beneath Ceaseless Skies. In the flash fiction space, I love Flash Fiction Online and Daily Science Fiction. What I really adore are places that are welcoming to fiction that's both literary and speculative in quality. There does seem to be a long-standing rift between literary fiction and speculative fiction that discourages literary fiction from venturing into weirder and more bizarre territory while discouraging speculative fiction from focusing clearly on people and relationships, instead of gadgets and adventures. I love lush, lyrical writing - you don't have to be Shakespeare, but I appreciate those who pay attention to craft and sentence structure. I appreciate Strange Horizons in particular for how it emphasizes lucid, poetic writing and experimental formats, combined with devastating character-driven storytelling.

I'm a bit of a classicist. Virginia Woolf, Dostoevsky, Joseph Conrad, and George Eliot are favorites in prose. In poetry, I love T.S. Eliot, H.D., William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore. My favorite writers are those who make the ordinary feel immense, who can take a single expression or mundane detail and make it feel elemental and primordial, as though it's being seen or heard for the first time. They exemplify what I idealize when I think about the vision of the great writer, the ability to take ordinary situations and interactions and strip away the calcified layers of indifference and routine to reveal the true essence of these experiences, imbuing them with an artistic, not merely materialist or conventional, character. Reading them is like gaining the chance to see in color after only seeing in black-and-white your whole life.

While I haven't seen other professional publications advocate as vehemently for literary speculative fiction, other publications certainly publish it, if not as many as I would like. There are many fewer that focus on flash fiction, the ability to make a complete artistic statement in a short amount of words, but there are others, like Daily Science Fiction and Flash Fiction Online. What I'd say separates this publication from those is 1) the greater focus on sharp, sparkling prose, style and form being as important as the content of the stories, and 2) a love of experimental and daring formats, from novels told in a log or journal format to non-linear storytelling.

I know this sounds overly obvious, but read the guidelines, and especially read what stories we've published in the past. Every story we've published in available for free in our archives, and because they're flash-fiction, they don't take long to read. I'm not saying you should be able to name your five favorite stories we've published, but a little bit of familiarity with our past publications is the best way to see what kinds of stories we prefer, to know that Orion's Belt style. Other than that, I recommend you think about our love of polished, lyrical prose when you're deciding whether to submit here, or what pieces of yours to submit. How a story is written is as important for us as its plot points. Elevated yet concise prose, with real attention paid to diction, syntax, and tone, is catnip to me. I love reading stories where a lot of time has clearly been spent on every word and sentence.

This feels like a bit of a trick question, as there's no one Platonically perfect model for submissions. There are different ideas of what a "perfect" Orion's belt story is. Still, the best stories tend to have a strong balance of grounded storytelling and speculative conceits, and the speculative elements should lay the foundation for the emotionally driven storytelling instead of disrupting it or just being distracting. There should also be a high amount of attention paid to the style of the piece. The prose should glisten. I want submissions that understand that how a story is written is crucial to determining how a reader experiences it; stories are not just a series of plot points. Word choice and sentence structure as vital to the spirit of the story. Obviously, don't use pretty words just because they sound nice, but I adore elucidating, lush, taut descriptions of landscapes or the internal world of a character's psyche.

We've gotten too many people that disregard the 1200-word limit that's posted in several different places on our website, so that's a little disappointing, but in terms of what people get wrong that we don't clarify on our website, I'd say a lot of people are under the assumption that more submissions automatically mean they have a higher percentage of getting a story selected. While we love to see the same people submitting again, month after month, submitting too many stories runs the risk of over-stimulating us and making us less willing to see what's special about one story in particular. Given the choice between sending us two stories and one elegant, polished story, send the one. We love pieces that have clearly had a lot of time poured into them, especially on the sentence by sentence level.

We love hearing about the lives of our submitters; it makes sorting through submissions feel much more human. Of course, we don't want your entire life story described in pages and pages of detail, but a little bit of information about your life will never hurt your chances with us. As for what we ardently recommend you include, a short cover letter is sufficient. Include the name of the story, its genre, length, and a few previous publication credits if applicable.

Because we publish flash fiction, we read every piece to the end. Doing otherwise would feel a little like an abnegation of duty considering how short these pieces are and considering how flash fiction especially should be considered as an organic, cohesive whole. The more interesting question is how long we spend on a piece before we tend to emotionally decide it's not for us. There are some piece wherein I can tell from the first few paragraphs that it's not for us, whether because it's more traditional, action-oriented genre fiction, or because the writing is just not very impressive. Even in those cases, though, I try to read the piece all the way through. Flash fiction in particular is a great place for a solid "set up/ payoff" structure, and I don't want to stop reading before I reach that payoff. More than once, I thought pieces we received weren't speculative fiction at all until I reached the final few paragraphs. Still, it's important to catch our attention in the first few paragraphs. A flash fiction piece that doesn't become interesting until 500 words in is a much bigger problem than a 10,000 word story that takes 500 words to become interesting.

We have a few round of submissions. Our editors and first readers review a piece after it's submitted. About 40% or so of pieces pass through to the second round. We divide these second-round fiction three ways between our two fiction editors and myself, with the poetry divided two ways between our poetry editor and myself. We each pick a handful of second-round pieces each week to move into the final round of submissions. I pick one story and one poem a month from our about two dozen final-round stories and one dozen final-round poems. After we choose the pieces, they go through multiple rounds of edits before they appear in Orion's Belt.

I love revealing our dark, cosmic secrets here at Orion's Belt! Though I wish I could say there were witches and folkloric chants involved, our actual process is quite boring. I have to sort through our first round of stories, offer rejection letters, sort through the more refined batch of second-round stories, write more personalized rejection letters, and hope that all our submitters have read our guidelines and don't send us 15,000-word novelettes, which has happened from time to time. We have a large folder wherein we place all first-round stories before they've been sorted, and we have smaller round-two folders for our editors, where all our round-two stories go before they're edited. Now that I have a large team behind me, less time is spent on the editing process, with more time being spent on sending off contracts, preparing our new issues, choosing or designing cover art, and making sure all our first readers and editors know what they're supposed to be doing. Still, all final-round decisions are made by me, with slight input from my top editors.

Our major line about this is one that I first heard when I was first submitting to magazines myself: "If we didn't already love your story, we wouldn't have selected it." I'm not a big supporter of super-intensive editing. While I understand its utility for books or extended essays, I don't think it makes sense either for the author or for us, the editors, in flash0fiction. There's no way to change a few major elements of the piece without basically transforming it into a different piece, which we're not interested in doing. If we have major hangups about a piece, we usually just choose to accept another piece. If we choose a piece, it's because we love it as is. We edit to make sure the piece is logically clear, and we change a few words or phrases to make the piece more sharp and lucid. We consult authors about significant changes, and we're always willing to listen to author input about even minor changes. But I must emphasize that if we choose your piece, it means we love about 99% of it already.

Of course! We announce our Pushcart slate at the end of the year, and we advocate for our stories in prestigious award competitions like the Hugos, Nebulas, Year's Best Science Fiction, etc.