Triangulation: Dark Glass is out the door ...

I'm a little behind, so you may already know about this. I'm sure all the fuss and excitement has filtered to you already. I mean, is there anyone who hasn't already seen the paparazzi photos of the release party?!

I'm talking, of course, about the publication of Triangulation: Dark Glass. Click on the link to go buy a copy. You won't be disappointed. You might find yourself overwhelmed with Miltons, though ... but that can't be helped.

What you may not know is that Pete Butler has stepped down as senior editor. Doing the anthology is a lot of work, and I think Pete decided it was time to make a little room in his life for other things.

So, that leaves me in charge. Why? Well, why not. Quite frankly, nobody else was stepping up, and I couldn't stand to see the project disappear. I mean, we've published some great fiction, and had a lot of fun.

But it's a lot of work, and even more so for the senior editor. Nobody else was willing to take on that responsibility, and a few people were outright refusing the job.

So, I've got it for 2010.

Quite frankly, I'm terrified. I mean, Pete left some huge shoes to fill. Look at all the success and critical acclaim the anthology has received since he started running things. It's a tough act to follow.

As fits my personality, I'm reacting to that fear by turning the dial past 11 and up to 12. For the past few months, my mind has been churning around how Pete did things, and why they are so successful. I've been carefully picking apart what's gone on and decided to change very little. The few things I've decided to change are based on making minor adjustments to address some of the few problems we had.

For example, we got way too many submissions at the tail end of the reading period this past year. That makes it tough to choose stories, because you assume that the inflow of stories will be fairly constant throughout the reading period except for a small spike at the end. When it's a large spike it throws things off because we really only had space for one or two more stories at that stage of the game. So this year I'll be posting the guidelines well in advance to give authors a few months to work on stories before the submission window even opens. I hope to have the guidelines posted before the end of August, which will give authors several months to work on stories.

But I don't plan on changing much else. For example, 4 out of the 5 previous staff are returning (Pete is the only one leaving for 2010). As a result, I feel confident that I'll be surrounded by people who I respect, and who I know will be helpful and supportive. I also plan to keep the submission rules pretty much the same as in previous editions, and we'll be following about the same format as far as decision making goes.

I do plan to up the hype some. I'm not 100% sure how, but Triangulation is an awesome product, and more people need to know about it. I have a few ideas, and we'll see how many of them work out.

Anyway, I expect to be writing a lot more on this blog regarding this as things ramp up. If you're planning on submitting a story, you might want to read my comments from Taking Flight as most of them were still valid while we put Dark Glass together, and I expect they'll still be valid for the 2010 edition.

Your puny science can't stop my fantasy!