Editor Interview: Trollbreath Magazine

Diverse speculative fic

We're big fans of Uncanny, Radon, Small Wonders, and a really wide range of titles. There's never enough time to read them all.

We adore Aimee Ogden and consider her one of the crop of really great writers who are sliding under a lot of folks radar. We've been really lucky to get to publish two unique stories of hers, and had admired her long before we opened. Jennifer Hudack is another writer we love, and were pleased to see her story from our second issue land in the Years Best Speculative Ecofiction anthology being published by Apex Book company. Honestly, there's too many to mention, from short stories to novels.

We're not afraid to publish nearly the entire breadth of fiction available in speculative genres. We don't mind overtly political pieces, either, and considering raging against the machine a critical and vital part of spec fic in this age of rising authoritarianism around the globe. And we're willing to take humor as well, which so many current magazines overlook. There's some truly fabulous spec fic humor stories that are going unpublished for lack of venues.

Read what we've already published. You'll get a very good sense of the type of stories we're looking for. Also, always review the submission guidelines before you submit again in case they've changed since the last time. If you feel like you've seen a story similar to your own somewhere recently, you probably have and it might be a good idea to file your story away for a little while.

A story by a relatively unknown author that absolute surprises us, either by tackling an old trope in a new way, or by bringing completely original sensibilities into their writing. We are particularly drawn to the odd and weird.

They think we have far more staff than we do. We are a literal mom and pop operation. We certainly notice when someone has submitted a piece previously, or when they've misunderstood our submission guidelines, or the meaning of "speculative" in speculative fiction.

Initially we don't need to know anything. We do ask for a cover letter, but we only read those once we're ready to accept a piece. Previous publications do not matter; we're thrilled to publish new authors for the first time.

With few exceptions, one of us reads every piece to the end. Depending on their score, the other co-editor will read as much as they feel is necessary to either confirm the original judgement, or provide a dissenting opinion if they do not agree. It's the best compromise we could find between reading every piece and providing quicker turnarounds on responses.

Once we have our holds, we evaluate each piece fully with a second read through (both of us read the whole piece this time). We may take into account additional factors like length, need for editing, or formatting (especially for poetry) that will make the piece more difficult for us to manage and impact the time we have to put together the issue.

When we are in a reading period:
I get up early (3:00 AM to 4:00 AM), get some coffee and I'm usually working on stories within an hour or so of waking up. Our submission form auto-fills a spreadsheet and places their file in a folder for us, so everything is generally read in the order it came in. We've also set up the automation of the form to rename any files to a standard format that makes it easier for us to find each entry. I read as much as I can until either it's time to get ready for my day job around 7:00 AM, or my mind is too burned out from all the words to give another work it's proper consideration. Some mornings that can mean upwards of 20 submissions unless I'm the co-editor playing catch up. If that's the case, I can go through considerably more because I won't be reading the whole thing.
Once we get to the end of the period, I start scheduling time to send replies so we can stay within our guidelines on response times. I put on some background music, then use a three-step process to respond to each submission in turn. We have to reply to the email with our response, mark the spreadsheet accordingly, and file the downloaded document in the proper hold or reject folder. But with practice and some automation built into the email program (I use Thunderbird email client instead of web clients), we can usually respond to about 100 an hour. Not quite as good as using Moksha perhaps, but it's a bit more affordable for us.
Jennifer's process is more chaotic because her damn job is more chaotic. We'll just leave it at that.

It really depends on the piece. In general, we tend to be a "light touch" magazine, doing as little editing as we can to retain the author's original intent as much as possible. We have, however, worked with authors to trim large sections out if we felt they were weakening an otherwise fine story. We are considering doing more in the future, but with only two staff, both of whom work day jobs, we prefer this method for the moment.
Authors do have all option to approve/reject edits. In one or two cases, though, we predicated our acceptance on the changes we thought the story needed, and will do so again if we think it's justified. In at least one case, we asked up front if they had intended a different ending, and got a positive response. They had only made the changes at the suggestion of their critique group, and we could tell what their original intent had been, so we had them re-write the ending back to what they intended. That's the kind of editing we like, when the author and we are all on the same page to help make their story shine.

We have not yet, but only because we didn't know we could until fairly recently. We are gathering a list of places where we can nominate pieces and plan to do so in the future.

(cackles a little psychotically) Most of our funding is from our day jobs and our savings. We are still growing and our five-year goal is for the magazine to be entirely self-sustaining through subscriptions. We plan to do a one-time kickstarter early in 2026 as a form of subscription drive. We will also build out additional products over time, including anthologies, bookmarks and other merchandise, etc.

Our primary base is on Bluesky. We also advertise on Instagram and Threads, however the algorithm is not our friend. We made a brief foray into TikTok and discovered that we are old and TikTok reminds us of a casino: loud and flashy. Mastodon yields no interactions for us so we've let it rest. We try to make a couple of cons a year to distribute merch and network. Synergy! Level Setting! Building Capacity! We know ALL the business terms and sometimes use them correctly!