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Editor Interview: Total Quality Reading (TQR)

Q: Describe what you publish in 25 characters or less.

A: goodstuff

Q: What other current publications (or publishers) do you admire most?

A: You all because you steer so many submissions our way.

Q: If you publish writing, who are your favorite writers? If you publish art, who are your favorite artists?

A: Tom Sheehan is the best living fiction writer on the planet. As far as dead folks go, Hemingway and Joyce and Heinlein are pretty good.

Q: What sets your publication apart from others that publish similar material?

A: Our evaluation process is transparent, meaning that you can go to the sight any day of the quarter and get fresh intelligence on the progress of the specific submissions making their way up through the hierarchy: from Floor to Terminal to Executive Suite.

Q: What is the best advice you can give people who are considering submitting work to your publication?

A: Be of strong heart and good cheer.Come hard or don't come at all, yo.TQRstories has turned submitting fiction into a contact sport. Primadonnas and sissies need not apply.

Q: Describe the ideal submission.

A: A work so stunning that it wins the Pushcart prize, propelling TQRstories into the vanguard of e-zinedom and the advertisers come a running and lay down bags of cash at our feet so that we can spend the rest of our days driving our enemies before us and hearing the lamentations of the women.

Q: What do submitters most often get wrong about your submissions process?

A: We cater to the long form short story (4,000 to 12,000 words), especially in terms of Web practices. So, we get a lot of 1,000 to 3,000 words submissions that we have to reject out of hand.

Q: How much do you want to know about the person submitting to you?

A: Initially, nothing. If their fiction touches the monkey, then we can sit down at the Queen's Rump and chat over drinks, preferably Old Style 40s.

Q: If you publish writing, how much of a piece do you read before making the decision to reject it?

A: Not sure how Gabby and Boligard handle that since they are the two people who are on the front line of submission discrimination. I only read the goodstuff that matriculates from them (The Floor) up to the Terminal and then up to me.But you can read all about their exploits trawling the slush the first month of each quarter by getting yourself to the site's NEW FREE MARKET menu item and then clicking on THE FLOOR.

Q: What additional evaluations, if any, does a piece go through before it is accepted?

A: Well, like I just said, a venture starts on the Floor, where it either is sent back into the deluge or sent up, via vacuum tube, to the Terminal where Lalo Telling, Maggie Murdoch and Otto (no last name cuz I think he's in the witness protection program) have a go with them. Then, surviving that ordeal, a work makes it's way to me in the Executive Suite where I decide whether I am going to publish it or not.All these steps along the way are viewable via the site's NEW FREE MARKET tab.

Q: What is a day in the life of an editor like for you?

A: TQR, owing to its public vetting process, doesn't get very many submissions. My theory is that only the strong-willed types who like being able to size up their competition will dare submit to TQR, but then, it's probably a matter of being unknown and/or a nonentity. Our marketing department sucks.So, getting back to your question, it's pretty easy. Gabby and Boligard and Lalo and Maggie and Otto do all the heavy lifting and then I get to sit back in my plush leather chair and decide, upon the sweat of their brow and fruits of their labor, which works die and which ones fly.

Q: How important do you feel it is for publishers to embrace modern technologies?

A: Oh yeah it's all about adapting to what the tech gods give you. TQRstories would not exist if gmail and photobucket weren't around. I piggy back on their free service in order to put out The Word according to TQRstories.There's currently a civil disagreement among the denizens of TQR about whether to get a FECESBOOK, errr, FACEBOOK presence going for our modest little review. Pardon my typo. We currently tweet each day's new machinations from the Floor and the Terminal and the Suite. But we don't bop or bugaloo. Sure. There's a place for tradition. I hear the Paris Review is boffo times two.But if you're on the Web, that thing they call the Infotainment Super Freeway, you're already so far gone that you ain't never coming back.In a word, TQRstories is constantly adapting to try and maximize investor utility through inspiration, innovation and, of course, perspiration.