Lots of people have been using the “Ask Us Anything” form on the contact page recently, which is great! We love hearing from you guys, and we try to give a prompt reply. (If we don’t promptly reply, it probably means that we’re thinking really hard to give you the best possible answer.) Since there have been a few questions lately about what kinds of works we’d consider for the book, I figured I’d take the time to address some of that here. (If you haven’t read the submission guidelines yet, you can do that here.)

Will you consider really short works? Like a joke or a haiku?

Mostly we’re looking for short stories that fall in the range of 1500 to 7500 words, but we’ll read submissions that fall outside those ranges on either side. We published a couple very short pieces (fewer than 200 words each) in the first book, so it’s not inconceivable that we’d do the same again. But the shorter something is, the more clever and original it needs to be. In other words: If you expect us to pay you $200 for a haiku, then it better be the best haiku in the world!

Will you consider poetry?

The spectrum of poetry is vast and varied — ranging from book-length epics to epigrams of only a few words — so it’s hard to give a single answer that applies to all poems equally. We’re not specifically looking for poetry, and we didn’t publish any poems in the first book. If you have a really great idea for a poem, we’ll certainly look at it — but it will have to be the kind of poem that can stand on its own in a book that’s otherwise full of short stories. A poem with at least a bit of a story might be a good place to start.

Will you consider comics or other graphic narratives?

Before I answer this, I should mention that we are looking for illustrators. But separate from that, we will also consider original stories that are told with art or some graphic element. We know it’s a lot of work to do a full story in comic format, which is why this wasn’t part of the call for submissions. But if you’re hell-bent on the idea, then we’ll certainly look at it! If you are doing something with art, the book is 6 x 9 inches, and will be printed in black and white.

Note: You are also welcome to include graphic elements (like diagrams, maps, graphs, etc.) with an otherwise traditional story.

What about a play or hyperfiction or something else not mentioned yet?

Look, we’ll give full consideration to almost anything you send us. (Unless it requires us to pay for delivery or assemble it ourselves.) But keep in mind that we’re publishing a book here. A book that will be available in print and in a variety of electronic formats. So if your submission is something that might be better presented in a different format, we will probably ask ourselves if it makes sense to put it in a book.

We also have our podcast and our talent show (which featured music, skits and short videos), so we’re definitely not opposed to the idea of works in other media. But right now we’re looking for things to go in a book — so ideally whatever you send us should be done with that in mind!

We’re a little more than two weeks into the submission period, which means we have a little less than eight weeks left to go. Without giving too much away, I figured this would be a good time to update everybody on how that process is going. Summed up in a single word, I would say: Awesome!

So far we have about 100 submissions, which is amazing in itself. I’m a fairly slow writer – it’s more likely that it’ll take me two years to finish a story than two weeks – so seeing what many of you can do in a short time period is incredible. We’ve also gotten lots of new creative ideas so far, which is exactly what we’re looking for. Already, we’ve seen stories set in different times and places, as well as different genres, different types of characters, and different ways of looking at the machine and its predictions. This is great!

This is a delicious curry, not a delicious soup — but the analogy stands.

There are already 100 submissions – should I still send in a story?

Absolutely, yes! It’s a really funny thing putting together a book like this. It’s actually very rare that all three of us read the same story and immediately say, “Yes, we must definitely have this story in the next book!” That’s because the book doesn’t exist yet. We’re building it from scratch and literally ANYTHING could go in there.

In a lot of ways, putting together an anthology is similar to making soup, or picking a stock portfolio, or fielding a basketball team (pick your favorite simile). Among all the other things we have to consider, we also have to think about how well the stories work together. So our mission isn’t simply to find thirty excellent stories. It’s to find thirty excellent stories that can be combined in a way that each story benefits the others. We’re looking for the right mix of vegetables, starches, and meats (or whichever of the other similes you preferred) to make the whole soup taste amazing. And in order to do that, we need the biggest possible basket of excellent ingredients to pick from.

This does mean that sometimes really wonderful stories get left out. That’s always a tough call, and we hate it when that happens. But we’ve been talking about ways we can use those stories somehow in the future. For instance, we’ve been reviewing some of the submissions we passed over for the first volume again. It’s possible that some of those stories might make it into Volume 2. Or we might do something else instead. But now that we know people are willing to read these stories, we aren’t going to let any of the great ones get away! So if you write us an excellent story, we are going to do our darnedest to use it one way or another, even if it won’t fit in the book.

In total, I’m hoping to read at least 600 stories for this new book. That’s in the same ballpark as the number of submissions we got last time, and it should be achievable with the volume of submissions we’ve gotten so far. Don’t let us down!

M. Bennardo, editor, reads a book unpretentiously at home. Photo by K. Sekelsky.

Can you tell us a little how the reading process works?

We’ve had a couple questions about this, and the answer is that all the stories are read by the three of us (that’s Ryan, Matt and David !). We don’t have any readers or assistants or freelance editors helping out – it’s just us. We’re not sure yet how to train somebody else to pick the kind of stuff that we would like, so that’s why we want to do it ourselves. Besides that, it’s a lot of fun.

Right now, we’re getting between five and seven stories a day, so we’ve been able to keep up pretty well with the incoming volume. As we get closer to the deadline, I’m expecting that we’ll receive more stories each day and that they’ll be longer on average. Depending on how many stories come in later, we may start dividing the reading duties. (We had to do this last time during the heaviest weeks or we never would have finished the reading in a reasonable amount of time.) It’ll still be just Ryan, Matt, and David ! reading the stories and every single story will get read – but it might only be read by one or two of us instead of all three. So if you want to make sure that all of us get a chance to read and fall in love with your story, I recommend sending it in sooner rather than later!

There’s another reason to send your stories in sooner, too. As soon as we read a submission, we make some notes about our impressions – what we liked, what we weren’t sure about, how we think the story will contribute to the book overall. Sometimes these notes spark discussion and debate. Sometimes a conversation about one story continues when we read other similar stories later. But the earlier we read your story, the more time we have to talk and think about it, and the more time we have to fall in love with it. You should definitely only submit your story when you think it’s finished – don’t rush it! But if you have the chance to get it in earlier, it might be to your benefit!

Comparative word counts of submissions received so far versus great works of literature. Help us put Ayn Rand’s verbosity to shame!

Is there anything you want to see more of?

I don’t want to give out any specific writing prompts because we’ve already supplied plenty of guidelines. And the stories we’ve read so far have been very creative and diverse, so I don’t even have any unfulfilled wishes in that department – except to continue to be surprised. But here’s what I can report so far.

Most stories are short. Since submissions have only been open for a little more than two weeks and since longer stories take more time to write, this is not really surprising or troubling. The average word count right now is a little over 3,100 words, which is just perfect for lots of stories. We would never encourage anybody to stuff padding into a tight story just to increase the word count. But I’m looking forward to the longer stories as well, since they bring a different flavor to the soup. So don’t be afraid to submit a 5,000 or 7,000 or even 10,000 word story if that’s how long it needs to be! (Anything over 10,000 words might be difficult to fit into the book, so you may want to consider that an upper limit.)

People live in different places. We’ve been tracking demographics as much as we can with this batch of submissions. We didn’t really pay attention to this dimension the first time around, so there have been some interesting discoveries. So far, we’ve gotten stories from people living in eight different countries on three continents. We’re still waiting for our first submissions from Asia, South America, and Africa. And if anybody in Antarctica has the time and an Internet connection – that would be incredible! (Dare I even suggest the possibility of submissions from the International Space Station?) It’s pretty neat to know that folks all over the world are interested in this book. We hope we only get more diversity!

Women are underrepresented. The other interesting piece of data that surfaced is that so far only 22% of the submissions are written by women. (As far as we can tell. We’re using first names and hints from the short bios to determine sex, so there’s another 5% – 10% that we can’t be sure of.) This was kind of an eye-opening moment for us, so we tried to do some more research into this. One source of data that we found is Strange Horizons, which has summarized its submission statistics for years now. In 2010, they reported that 30% of their submissions were from women and another 13% were unknown. Clearly, they’re doing better than we are when it comes to attracting women writers – but even their numbers are pretty troubling.

We’re new to this editing thing, and as independent editors we don’t even have access to the same industry resources and experience as other publishers might. So we don’t really know what this means or how to explain it. We could speculate, sure – but that’s just so much hot air without more data to back it up. We also don’t know if there are similar entrenched disparities that aren’t so easy to pick out using contact info – our submissions might also be disproportionately weighted to writers of a particular age, race, sexual orientation, religious belief, political affiliation, or educational background. We would have no idea.

So I’m going to end with a two-part call to action. First, we know that women are underrepresented in our submissions, so if you are friends with an amazing writer who is also a woman, please encourage her to submit a story to us! And second, if you are friends with any amazing writer of any sex, age, race, and all those other things, please encourage him or her to submit as well! There are no doubt many viewpoints and experiences that are underrepresented in fiction today, but the only way we’ll ever get a chance to bring them to the world is if they are submitted to us in the first place.

All photos by Eric Akaoka / More photos of the event here!

Thanks so much to everyone who came to see us in Toronto! We had a great time. We brought two cases of books, which we thought would be plenty, but they were gone by midmorning Sunday. It was also super neat to see you bring your copies from home to have signed! Hooray in every way!

We were also totally thrilled to see such a massive crowd at the Draw & Guess event. Folks were lined up both directions by the door, filling both walls of one hallway entirely and queuing out further onto the library floor. We’re so pleased you enjoyed the event — we heard nothing but nice things afterwards. Which is great, because we want to do it again! It’s proving to be a really fun game that we hope to keep staging at different events if we can. It’ll only get better as we work out the kinks!

Here is video, in case you weren’t at the show! It’s about 30 minutes long.

Machine of Death Draw & Guess at TCAF 2011! from Vimeo.

The camera unfortunately didn’t pick up the first three clues, which, for the record, were “DOLPHIN,” “BURIED BY NEWSPAPERS” and (pictured above) “INABILITY TO UNDERSTAND METAPHORS.”

Here’s another fun thing we had at the show:

Besides signing the books — which anyone can do — we thought it’d be neat to give folks some official evidence that they were there, some reward for taking the trouble to come out to the show. So we went a little EMBOSSER CRAZY.

We’ll have the Official MoD Seal Embosser at most places we travel, so if we’re coming to your town, please bring your copies of the book to come be Stamped and Sealed! It’s like a weights & measures inspection — it protects the book from being tampered with.

Next place we’ll have the stamp is Maker Faire in San Mateo this weekend, then World Steam Expo in Michigan, then Heroes Con in Charlotte, then Calgary Comics & Entertainment Expo in June!

We’ve gotten quite a few emails linking to stories like this one (“New blood test can predict your life expectancy.. but critics warn of life insurance hikes”) and this one (“The £400 test that tells you how long you’ll live”).

Basically all we can say is, as readers of our book, you are WELL PREPARED to consider the possible ramifications of what this machine means for you, for your friends and family, for society, AND for life insurance. You’re extra prepared, actually, because you can also deal with a machine that tells you how, and not just when!

The test even works off of a blood sample, which matches up 100% with the machine in the comic. I need to start writing comics about a machine that introduces a post-scarcity economy to the world and also invents holodecks, and we will be SET.

photo credit: The Independent

Flickr photo by Kerry Lannert

Unlike most fiction writing, a themed anthology is really a collaborative medium. It works best when all the gears mesh, when the reader is carried from one page to the next and one story to the next effortlessly and emotionally.

This requires, of course, that all the individual stories combine to make the book a compelling overall experience. But obviously, any individual writer can’t know what everyone else is writing!

That’s where we come in. With only two months remaining in the submission period for Volume 2, this is our director’s voice saying “Here is how you can play your part most effectively in this collaboration. Here is what we want and don’t want — what will work in the final book, and what won’t.”

Why are there Approaches to Avoid?

During the Volume 1 submission process, we watched a lot of folks barrel down certain trails with their stories — trails that very quickly became extremely well-worn. When lots of stories are overly similar, it presents a few problems:

• As editors, we become tired of seeing the same tropes over and over again. When writers unwittingly write something that we consider a cliché, it tends to dispose us against that story. Fresh ideas make stories more likely to be bought by us.

• Regardless of our personal feelings, we feel that the easy places to go with the concept don’t provide an interesting experience for a reader of the final book. If all the stories explore only the obvious things that everybody else would also think of, why bother? Fresh ideas are more compelling for the reader.

• Any writer who writes a story that covers ground extremely well-trod is spending time and energy that could instead be applied to a more compelling story. Fresh ideas are a better use of the writer’s effort.

Clearly, it’s in everyone’s best interest to try and avoid the well-worn trails! To nip these issues in the bud during the Volume 1 submission process, we created a section in our guidelines called Approaches to Avoid. We have basically the same list this time around, and below we’ve gone further into detail about the plot elements we’d recommend you steer clear of.

If you have written — or want to write — or are halfway done writing a story that tags each of these no-nos like you’re rounding the bases in the World Series, don’t take it personally! But do take it to heart. This is your second chance! We’ll gladly read another story by you that does something different. Please write that story for us!

One more thing: we understand why these ideas are so common. It’s not bad to write a story like this; our first book had several examples of each of the below. But now we want to go deeper. Your task, as a writer, is to prove to us that you can go deeper.

All About the Prediction (And Nothing Else)

We want to see stories in which the machine plays a part — in which characters or society are affected by its presence, and we get a window into an interesting world that’s different from our own. That can be done a million different ways, and not all of them have to be all about a single person getting, or not getting, or coming to terms with their prediction. We see a lot of stories that share the same basic DNA:

A person is tested for the very first time. What could the prediction mean? Drastic measures must be undertaken to avoid this fate! But, oh no — their prediction comes true in a strange way! DEAD. Fade to black.

OR

A person does not want to be tested. But then they are (for work reasons, or because of peer pressure, or accidentally) and now they are stuck with the knowledge. The End.

OR

A person gets their prediction. They will prove the machines wrong by dying in some other way instead! But the plan goes awry, and they die in the predicted way. Fade to black.

These stories can be fine, but we have by now read a lot of them. They are easy, and we understand why this is a common first stop for a writer. But now let’s move on! Let’s do something different.

The List of Changes

This is the story that just explains stuff. “There was a guy who got tested, and this happened to him. Then another guy got tested, and this happened. The government did this, and then the Church did this.” And on, and on.

Stories should have a central conflict, with a beginning, middle, and end. A list of ideas can be cool — but then find a voice on the ground, a personal perspective, a character who is affected by the changes. Show us that person’s experience, rather than just talking about the world in general.

The Tease

This is any story titled something like “GLOBAL ALIEN INVASION” that gets the reader excited when they read the table of contents, but then there is not remotely a global alien invasion in the actual story.

Philosophy 101

This story is just a construct for people to debate or explain The Nature of Fate. Sometimes the argument is about the existence or non-existence of God or free will. By the end of the story, maybe one character is convinced of another’s argument, but nothing has actually happened in a narrative sense. In stories, events happen. A person does something that changes things. Then, the changed situation affects them in a new way. Then they react to the new situation, etc.

The Resigned Misanthrope

A person gets a sad prediction, say SUICIDE or CANCER or ALONE, and then just resigns him/herself to that fate. These kinds of stories make readers sad. We’re not saying that every story has to be lighthearted, or even pleasant. But we do not want readers to not want to finish the book because it’s too depressing. So we are unlikely to publish stories that are too bleak.

The Golden Sunset

In this story, everyone comes to peace with their prediction, and sometimes there is what amounts to a suicide as the 90-year-old with “DROWNING” solemnly hugs his family and then steps off a pier. This is possible to handle well, but it’s tricky to make work if it’s the entire dramatic content of the story.

The Fly on the Wall

For some reason, there is a tendency with relationship-based stories to spend a lot of time just talking. Just talking about nothing, just being in the relationship. Maybe the couple has a meal; maybe they have a fight. Maybe the prediction causes a rift in the relationship.

All this is stuff that would probably happen for real in a world where the machine exists. But let’s say we have 30 windows into that world, and 30 windows only. We want to see as much of that world as possible in the short time we have — as much variety as we can cram in. Stories about more-or-less normal people doing nothing but more-or-less normal things have a hard time competing in that race.

The Letter of the Law

Someone realizes that if their prediction reads “POISON,” they cannot be killed by anything else ever. So they go around tempting fate and defying death in implausible ways. This is a hard story to do well, because by now we (the readers and the editors) know that: 1. Something non-predicted might not kill you, but it can certainly paralyze you for life until you do die in the predicted way. 2. It is easy to play with wordplay to find a way that something seemingly innocuous can kill you (say, a car hits you because the driver was reaching down to pick up a dropped Poison CD).

Another expression of this same idea is when everybody takes a prediction literally, often to prove the existence of something the machine prints the name of (aliens, God, Armageddon, etc). The same exceptions apply — because maybe someone will die of “GOD” when a religious fanatic kills them.

A more subtle version of this is when somebody receives what seems like an obvious prediction, and cannot take it any way but literally. You can tell interesting character stories about a person who feels they have to interpret the prediction this way, but in general, it’s always super dicey to make an easily-disproven semantic argument the main thrust of any plot.

The Rehash

Everybody who reads our book will have already read the explanation of the concept. They probably will have read the first book too. Any story that spends a ton of time re-explaining the concept, or which is overly similar to any of the stories in the first book, has a very low chance of being bought for the second book. (Read the first book if you’re unsure if you’re breaking new ground or not.)

The Super Unpleasant Experience

We know that in a book about death, there will be some unpleasantness. What we probably don’t need is a completely unbroken experience of repulsiveness, where characters ooze all sorts of fluids and there’s sexual violence and everybody hates their life and wants to die. It’s just not fun for anybody to read.

The Death-Happy World

This is the story where people drop dead like flies all the time, but everybody takes it in stride. It’s possible to tell a story about someone discovering that since the machine’s invention, people die more often and of stranger things — but absent that explanation, or a deliberately farcical situation, we expect a world that operates pretty much like our own. When people act cavalier about murder, for example, or when brains are getting splattered on the sidewalk every Tuesday morning at 8 o’clock, it jolts us out of the believability of the story.

Not About the Machine at All

This seems obvious to me, but I guess some people don’t read the submission guidelines well enough. (Those same people are unlikely to be reading this post, but I’ll mention it anyway.) We are not going to publish any story that doesn’t involve a machine that can predict your death. I don’t think that’s too much to ask?

Okay, Smarty, So What DO You Want?

Your mission, as a writer, is to come up with the best possible story that fits into our world. The only major difference between that world and this world is that people in that world can undergo a blood test to find out how they are going to die.

So the stories that we’re interested in are those that, in an interesting or entertaining way, somehow explore some aspect of how this machine would affect the world or people individually.

For instance, how would such a machine affect the way we understand science or religion? How would it change the way we make war, or investigate crimes, or distribute social services, or treat sick people? How would people feel when they learned their fate? How would they feel when they learned the fates of their loved ones? Would people face discrimination if others knew how they were going to die?

In general, what’s the kind of story that immediately pops into your mind? Now, can you go deeper?

Think of something that exists in today’s world, and ask yourself, “In the world in which the machine exists, how would that thing change?” Who would it affect? Who would it not? Would everybody react negatively, or would some react positively? Why would they?

What’s your personal immediate reaction to the machine? What kind of character would want to convince you of the opposite perspective? Could you create the world of that character? What factors have made them feel that way?

How would the initial invention of the machine affect society? What would a society that had been raised with the machine look like? What if it was taken away from them?

Would the machine be taken at face value? Would it be trusted, or not? Who would have an interest in either establishing or damaging the credibility of the machine’s results?

How would the machine affect businesses? What kinds of new products and services would be invented, and which would become obsolete? Who are the people who would be affected by those ramifications?

Would the machine itself be commercially successful? Who would want it to be available, and who would want to repress it? What would they do to achieve their goals?

What if the machine existed in a different time or place, or an unusual setting? What if its use was confined to only a certain geographical area, a certain class of people, or a certain time in history? Why would that be, and who would it affect?

How would the machine affect a non-Western society? A nontraditional family? Someone with wealth? Someone impoverished? Anyone who’s not a generic urban/suburban middle-class white person?

This is only a partial list, but I hope it helps clarify your thinking about the sorts of ways you can distinguish your own stories. I’ll write more later about craftsmanship, which I think is a subject all its own. In the meantime, the three of us continue to look forward to reading your work! It’s tremendously exciting for us every time a new submission shows up in the inbox, and we want to do all we can to help you make your story the best it can be.