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Editor Interview: Luna Station Quarterly

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

A: SFF by women-id authors

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

A: 365 Tomorrows, Fantasy Magazine, Ideomancer, Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons

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

A: Neil Gaiman, Jane Yolen, Ray Bradbury, Becky Chambers, Kelly Link, Ted Chiang, Margo Lanagan

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

A: The on-going mission of Luna Station Quarterly is to display the vast and varied talents of women-identified speculative fiction writers.

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

A: Besides identifying in some way on the women end of the gender spectrum, make sure you have thoroughly proofread your stories. Typos, grammar errors, inconsistent use of the semi-colon, all of these things make it look like you don't care about your story. If you don't care about it, neither will an editor.

Q: Describe the ideal submission.

A: The ideal submission for Luna Station Quarterly is a story with great characters, great plot, or a great idea behind it. That's obvious for any publication. What makes a story best suited to LSQ, though, is a sense of intimacy, of grit and reality, even if that reality is a million light years away or a million years in the future.

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

A: We use Submittable, so from a technical standpoint, our submission process is pretty much foolproof. From a writing standpoint, authors most often fail to proofread their stories for, not just spelling, but also structure and story consistency. Also of note is that we do not accept poetry.

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

A: Previous publications don't hold a ton of sway with us. Yes, we'll be impressed if you won the Pushcart Prize, but your story still has to fit our guidelines. However, we're also genuinely excited to read work by previously unpublished authors. We've had the pleasure of being quite a number of authors' first publication credit.

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

A: We read every single entry in it's entirety. If you send your story to us, we read the whole thing before making a determination.

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

A: We go through multiple rounds of reading, winnowing down the choices in each round, so each story that is published has been read by the majority of our editorial staff.

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

A: I feel this is very important. Luna Station Quarterly has a Twitter account, Facebook page, GoodReads account, and a few other social media goodies in our pocket. We also produce a print, pdf and ebook version of each issue. The entire LSQ site is run on a modern Wordpress backend to keep things running smoothly. In short, modern tech is very important to our publication.

Q: How much do you edit an accepted piece prior to publication?

A: We proofread for spelling and grammar errors and make occasional small fixes to ensure clarity, but do so with the intent to keep the authors voice and style intact. At this time we do not get author approval for final edits as our schedule does not permit it.