BEHIND THE SCENES STORIES OF THE WRITER’S EGO:
Whenever I receive an anthology or an issue of a magazine where one of my stories appears, I read the whole thing cover to cover, to determine how my contribution stacks up to those of other contributors.
More frequently than I can tell you, my judgment declares my story one of the two or three best, sometimes enough to take the top slot.
This is ego, but not just ego. As it happens, I am very tough on myself, extraordinarily tough on myself. I see nothing but flaws. But in most anthologies, there are any number of stories that just lie there, by my judgment; that are there to fill pages, that are not as memorable as others.
I don’t say that I’m always and invariably the author of the best story in the book. I’m not that inane. I say only that I’ve noted it a few times, out of dozens of publications, and that I’m satisfied in many cases just to be among the book’s standouts. Sometimes it’s a low bar, sometimes a high one. (I have also been in anthologies where my story was a two-finger exercise I wasn’t particularly proud of, that I just tossed off; once or twice, going for the paycheck when normally I can’t even complete a story unless I deeply believe in it, so yeah, there have been a couple of my times where I was clearly the book’s detritus. Just a couple.)
And no, I think I’ll refrain from naming the anthologies where I believe my own stories to have been the best, because I am not about to aggrandize myself by shitting on so many others. That’s not the point I’m making.
I’m competitive, is what I am saying.
It is in this context that I report that I have last night started reading my Advance Review Copy of 2015 BEST AMERICAN SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY, and devoured the first three stories in the book, a selection that includes a heartbreaking dystopia, a fantastic journey, and a rumination on loss and recovery, and that they are all exquisite, all stories of divine craft that meld the imagination with profound human feeling; and they all plunge the competitive part of me into despair in different ways; and they all make me as a reader exult about the heights this field can reach. Together with the scattered stories from later in the book I already remember encountering in the last year, they are all splendid works of art. While I am confident that my piece belongs within these covers, I am left absolutely humbled to silence by the magnitude of the company.
On the basis of those first three stories, alone, I am ready to call this book a monument.
Comment By: redheadedfemme
August 1st, 2015 at 1:18 pm
I preordered this. Really looking forward to it.