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A to Z Challenge, Niteblade

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NitebladeWhen I first started Niteblade I did everything but the .pdf layout which Jo did. It was a lot of work. A lot. Like far more than I’d expected going in. Still, I had have control issues so I sucked it up and did what needed to be done.

Then I decided to add some book reviewers. It started with Amber Stults but eventually grew. At one point we had five book reviewers on staff. That was okay with my control-freak self though, because they were essentially independent contractors doing work-for-hire. Which is not to say I didn’t appreciate what they did, I did, still do, but they didn’t have any power, so things were okay. (We no longer do book reviews, but Amber has stuck around and conducts interviews with contributors and others for our blog).

But still, running Niteblade was a lot of work. Slowly it was beginning to wear me down and I began to think about closing the doors. I didn’t want to, you understand, I was just getting worn down. That’s when BD Wilson came on board. BD was (and remains) one of my best friends and so when she offered to take over the web-based part of the magazine, it was only a small struggle with myself to hand over the keys. I couldn’t have made a better decision. Today BD takes care of everything to do with the website, from making it look awesome to ensuring things work smoothly on the back end. I don’t know anything about how the website works anymore, that’s all her. It’s always fantastic. Niteblade would not exist if not for BD. She saved it when I was thinking of closing it and she keeps it going like, if you’ll pardon the cliche, a well-oiled machine.

Even so, Niteblade takes up a lot of my time, and it used to take up more. That’s where Submittable and slush readers come in. Oh my gawd. Slush readers. How I love them. When I switched from email submissions to using Submittable it angered some submitters, but I stuck to my decision because of two big reasons. First, it would mean I’d stop getting spammed. Seriously. You wouldn’t believe the amount of spam my submission email accounts were getting. Secondly, it meant I could bring on some slush readers and make things a bit easier on myself. And did it ever. Man I love slush readers.

We’ve had many different readers over the years so I don’t want to try listing you all in case I miss someone. Still. Slush readers rock. Truly. They have a mostly glamourless job but they are so important. The first line of defense, as it were. They help filter out the submissions that are patently inappropriate for Niteblade and since we started having slush readers the amount of time I have to spend in the slush has decreased immensely. Because I’m sharing the work. It’s fantastic. Our current slush readers are Alexis Hunter, Samantha Kymmell-Harvey and Megan Engelhardt and in my mind they are all rockstars.

And then there is Alexandra Seidel. Alexandra started at Niteblade as a slush reader, but when she expressed a desire to read poetry slush I thought, why not? After a very short while with her reading poetry slush I offered her the position of poetry editor at Niteblade. She and I co-edited a special poetry only print issue of Niteblade together to mark the transition of editoryness (which yes, is totally a word) and then I handed over control of the poetry section to her. This was tough for my little control-freak self, but it was the right decision. Alexa has proven to be a strong, capable poetry editor and has done a lot to increase the visibility of our poetic offerings.

Of course, Niteblade wouldn’t be the same without Marge Simon, but I’ve already dedicated a whole entry to her, so let’s just say she rocks and leave it at that LOL

I wish I could dedicate a whole entry to everyone who works behind the scenes at Niteblade to make it awesome, but I can’t. Not without getting all gush-y and driving readers away. But to all of you, thank you. Thank you so very much. You are the reason Niteblade is as amazing as it is. I couldn’t do it without you.

~*~

A2Z-2013-BADGE-001Small_zps669396f9This post has been written as a part of the Blogging from A to Z Challenge. My theme this year is ‘Niteblade‘, which is the magazine I publish. I chose this theme to help draw attention to the magazine during this, it’s 2nd annual fundraiser.

My first post in this series was about choosing stories and poems to nominate for awards and I’ve gone through a similar process in deciding what to write about for these posts. Not only did I have to choose stories and poems I loved, but they also had to fit with the A-Z theme. Tricky!

 

 

Niteblade

Control Issues

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Control issues. I haz em.

When you say it like a Lolcat it sounds almost cute, but they aren’t. They are a huge pain in the ass, for me and everyone else around me. I’ve been working on them for years and years, and one thing that has helped more than anything else is Niteblade**.

When I published the first issue of Niteblade, way back in September 2007, Jo (also known as Jonathan) did the layout for the .pdf and Marge Simon and Shawn Zinyk provided the art (Marge has done all the art since the first issue). I did everything else. Everything. I created and maintained the website, solicited submissions, made editorial decisions, worked on promotion, etc. etc. It was a lot of work, but it was all under my control and that was just the way I liked it.

More or less.

As Niteblade grew so did the workload. You might be surprised how much time can be sucked away answering emails about submission guidelines, for example. Or interview/book review requests. It all adds up, quickly.

Soon I realised I wasn’t going to be able to handle all the book review requests, so if I wanted to accept them I’d need help. That’s where Amber Stults came in. She was our first book reviewer. At one point we had a whole team of book reviewers but managing them and all the finicky little details associated with doing book reviews began to take up too much time so we canceled that aspect of Niteblade. Amber is still here though. Not reviewing books but doing author interviews for our News blog. She’s awesome, works independently and provides regular content for our blog readers without any effort or supervision on my part.

Richard Fay used to do the same thing on our blog, only he was showcasing artists and their work. We canceled that feature, not because of anything on Richard’s end, but because finding artists who wanted to be in our spotlight was becoming more work than it was worth. Go figure.

Anyway, even with Amber and Richard taking slender slices from my Cake of Control I was still responsible for the bulk of the work at Niteblade (and did I mention that it’s a lot of work? It is.). At one point I was feeling very overwhelmed. Niteblade was taking over my life. I wanted to be a writer/editor, not an editor/writer but the magazine was sucking away so much of my time and energy that I didn’t feel like I was getting anything else done, and also we’d been “hacked”. Argh!

“Argh,” I vented to my best friend BD Wilson, “I don’t know how much longer I can do this. I think I may need to close the doors on Niteblade.”

That was when BD saved Niteblade. She joined our staff and took over control of the website. She’s totally automated everything, made it look super purdy and she does all the web-based layouts. She’s fantastic and if it weren’t for her stepping in and taking over that huge responsibility Niteblade wouldn’t be here today. Everything runs smoother now because of BD.

And Niteblade kept growing.

That meant my workload didn’t really decrease despite the fact I had so many people sharing it. Argh! I said. I wasn’t quite as overwhelmed as I had been before when I considered shutting the doors, but I was frustrated. I couldn’t keep up on submissions and my submission email addresses were starting to get more and more spam. But along came Submittable, which made it super easy for me to get help dealing with submissions. We got our first set of slush readers and TA-DA! It was like a giant weight had been lifted from my shoulders. The slush readers* helped weed out the stories that are absolutely inappropriate for our magazine (or the ones from people who don’t follow our guidelines) and so suddenly I only had to read about a quarter of the submissions I used to. Sweet!

Then, one of our slush readers, Alexandra Seidel, wrote a blog about her adventures in the slush pile and mentioned that she was sad to not be reading poetry slush. I began sharing the poetry slush with her and, eventually, she took over completely as poetry editor. Giving her that responsibility, that control, was one of the most difficult decisions I’ve ever made. Ever. But it was a good decision. Alexandra is a fantastic poetry editor. She makes some editorial choices that are quite different from the ones I would were I poetry editor, but the calibre of the poetry we’re publishing has increased dramatically since she took over from me, so I think she’s doin’ it right. I *loved* every poem she picked for the September issue. So much so that choosing which one to put on our cover was a freaking nightmare. She’s an awesome poetry editor and Niteblade is stronger for her presence.

My point is this. Over the past five years Niteblade has taught me how to delegate, how to give away bits of power, slices of control to worthy people. Not only has it made the magazine better, it’s made me better. It’s a huge thing, and maybe it’s something I would have learned just over the course of aging over the last five years, but I dunno… Even if that’s the case, Niteblade, and all the people involved in making it the awesome publication that it is, sped up the process immensely.

I used to like saying that Niteblade was mostly a one-woman show, but now, as we near our five year anniversary, I’m proud to say that it’s takes a whole team of people to put it together, and I think we do an awesome job.

*Our slush readers change from issue to issue, but right now  Megan Engelhardt, Sheri White and Andrew Patterson are the ones toiling in the trenches to make sure our submitters get responses in a timely manner.

**Becoming a mother and “inheriting” a litter of kittens who were only three weeks old also helped LOL A lot.

~*~

This blog post is just one stop on the blog train we’re holding to celebrate Niteblade’s fifth anniversary. Please check out Chris Lewis Carter’s blog if you haven’t already. Chris wrote the awesome story, The Cord, in the March 2012 issue and this train stopped at his blog yesterday. Tomorrow it’s chugging along to Alexis A. Hunter’s blog. Alexis wrote the fabulous short story, Dragons of Fire that we published in our June 2012 issue.

As for me, in trying to decide what to write about for this blog I realised I have a lot to say about Niteblade, so I expect to blog about it more often (for the next little while anyway).

 

Writing

Winding Path

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NaNoLJers Anthology 2011The first annual NaNoLJers anthology is done, and doesn’t it look pretty?

NaNoLJers is a livejournal community run by Amber Stults (as of December 2011) which I founded in 2005.I created it selfishly, so that I’d have a group of people I would feel accountable to in regard to my NaNoWriMo novel. On the unselfish side of my motivations, you have the fact I truly wanted to help other people achieve their NaNoWriMo goals too.

Since 2005 NaNoLJers has grown into a community of about 1,000 people but it’s really quiet. Like, really, really quiet, except in May, October and November. That’s because in May we run a writing challenge called Writo De Mayo. November is obviously all about NaNoWriMo and October is about pre-NaNo excitement LOL Still, there are writing prompts, exercises and the like posted on a regular basis (some of them by yours truly) and a great bunch of people are members. If you poke them just right they sometimes even come out to chat outside of the busy periods. Sometimes…

Anyway, before I stepped down as the community leader I started what I hope will become a NaNoLJers tradition — the annual anthology.

Putting together the guidelines was a little tricky and required a lot of tinkering. The thing about NaNoLJers (gawd, could I say that word anymore? LOL) is that we’ve got members at every stage of their writing careers. Some are professional writers and some are just starting out. I wanted to find a way to showcase everyone’s work no matter where they fit on the spectrum. I think we managed it here. Members of the community didn’t submit work for consideration, they submitted it for publication. That way there was no judgement. Less fear. Make no mistake, putting your work ‘out there’ for people to read for the first time (especially) is terrifying. I wanted to minimize that.

I decided to call this anthology Winding Path for three reasons:

  1. The title fit with the cover image that we, as a writing community, had chosen to use as the cover.
  2. One of the pieces sent in for inclusion was titled Winding Path
  3. This anthology took a very winding path toward completion. First there was the endless tweaking of the guidelines for ‘submission’ and then deadlines kept getting pushed back, and finally I had some personal issues with focus and getting things done that pushed back it’s completion even further.

It’s done now, and looks pretty spiffy, even if I do say so myself. It was the first time I’d ever done the entire layout for a .pdf myself (Jo does that stuff for Niteblade) and I learned a crapload of things in the process. That should hopefully make things go smoother next time I do a layout. I tried to do the cover design but then the following conversation took place:

Me: *grumble, swear, grumble*
Jo: You okay?
Me: No. I’m not a graphics person. I don’t do graphics, I do words!
Jo: I do graphics. For a living, even. *gently takes my laptop away*

I think he did a gorgeous job, far better than I could have.

So, if you’re curious you can download a copy of the NaNoLJers Anthology (completely free) at our community page:

~ Winding Path ~

It contains stories by Clare Revell, Amber Stults, Debbie Gorsuch, Emi Bullard, Reb Kreyling, Jade Brooke and yours truly. I’m hoping that next year we’ll have even greater interest and a bigger collection to show for it at the end. If you think you’d like to be a part of that, just join the community and keep an eye open for the guidelines I’ll be putting up sometime around June. Or just read the anthology. It’s all good.