Selecting our Stories - A Guest Post by Dawn Vogel

(Many thanks to Dawn Vogel for the following piece. The anthology mentioned, Battling in All Her Finery, is quite enjoyable and will be reviewed here in the next day or two. This is kind of cool because I received my first ever rejection letter from the Mad Scientist Journal. It was richly deserved.)

We're putting out our anthology of stories, Battling in All Her Finery, and wanted to offer a look behind the scenes. Choosing the stories for an anthology is a big chunk of the work, but not everyone knows how that process happens.

For this anthology, we were looking for stories about women leaders. We opted for a broad definition of "leader," which included not only generals and royalty, but also CEOs, musicians, and more. The end result is an anthology of 21 fantasy, science fiction, alternate history, and other speculative fiction stories of women leaders.

We held an open call for submissions for this anthology and received more than a hundred stories to choose amongst. Submitting authors were from all over the world, including some from non-English speaking countries, and representing diverse races, gender presentations, and sexualities. We received a wide range of story lengths, from very short pieces to longer stories. We had a budgeted word count based on the success of the Kickstarter that funded this anthology, so we looked at story themes, types of leaders, and word count when making our decisions.

For the themes of the stories, we wanted a nice mix of stories with happy endings, bittersweet endings, and even some with more melancholy endings. While we probably tended toward more of the first two of those, that wasn't always the case. Some of our personal favorite stories to emerge from the slush pile were the more bittersweet endings—those that ended on a positive note, but with some sacrifice made by the woman leader in order to reach that ending.

Because we wanted to have a broad range of leaders, this sometimes meant comparing two stories with similar types of leaders to see which one overlapped less with a story that we'd already decided on. It also meant focusing on those stories that didn't have a traditional leader—we received plenty of queens/princesses and generals/other military leaders, so the stories that featured non-military and non-nobility/royalty often provided us with a unique type of leader that couldn't be replicated by another story.

For the word count, we accepted stories between 500 and 8,000 words, which gave authors a wide range to play around with. In past anthologies, we've sometimes selected flash fiction pieces, but for this anthology, our shortest story selected wound up clocking in at 2,000 words, while our longest was right at 8,000 words.

In addition to the other factors in our selection process, we also wanted to create an all-ages anthology, which we wouldn't feel weird about handing to our young nieces, nephews, and other children and teenagers in our lives. While some of the stories still touch on darker themes and subjects, we tried to keep the general "rating," as it were, to a PG-13 at worst. Most of the stories would be easily classified as PG.

It can be a very delicate balancing act to get the right mix of stories for an anthology, but by looking at these factors, we think we managed to put together a collection of stories that readers will enjoy, while still embodying the themes of our anthology, the focus on women leaders, and within the budget we had.