{"id":377,"date":"2026-09-14T15:51:33","date_gmt":"2026-09-14T15:51:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.munchkinstein.co.uk\/?p=377"},"modified":"2026-09-14T15:51:33","modified_gmt":"2026-09-14T15:51:33","slug":"on-editing-an-anthology-a-haver","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.munchkinstein.co.uk\/index.php\/2026\/09\/14\/on-editing-an-anthology-a-haver\/","title":{"rendered":"On editing an anthology: A haver"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This year marks forty years of the Glasgow SF Writer’s Circle and to celebrate this they are producing an anthology called Haverin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is my “delight” to be one of the editors, following up on my helping out with the book released at the last Worldcon in Glasgow called Gallus. To note the release and the anniversary I’m doing a set of blog posts and this is the second one, with some random thoughts on being an editor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Volunteering is for numpties<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Back in 2022 I was at the local Glasgow convention Satellite and part of a conversation wondering if the Circle would publish anything for the Worldcon, coming up in 2024. Reckoning that the only way I could get my name in something at that Worldcon was to volunteer to help edit, I joined Neil Williamson and Beth (E.M.) Faulds and the book Gallus was created. A collection of twenty-five stories by current members of the GSFWC with a glorious cover by Jenni Coutts, it was launched in a blizzard of tablet and signings that was mostly a blur to me, but I’m told was fun.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Once the dust had settled on that, talk turned to another collection, this time to celebrate the Circle’s fortieth anniversary. For this it was felt we needed some continuation of experience but, due to them having so much award winning success, Neil and Beth stepped aside and I found myself (bafflingly) the voice of wisdom with two new volunteers, Heather Valentine and Peter Morrison, as my fellow editors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is where it got fun.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Back in 2016 the Circle produced an anthology for its thirtieth anniversary, Thirty Years of Rain, which had contributions from its entire history and we felt we should do something similar. So we asked far and wide, from people who were there at the start to those coming along today and we got over forty entries. Way more than we’d got for Gallus.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And the thing was, they were all decent and had potential. To do that terrible editor thing of rejecting people was going to be very hard, especially as many of them we’d have to say hello to on an ongoing basis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of the great things about a writing group collection, and big differences to a standard anthology call, is that we can use the Circle to work on and improve people’s submissions. The Circle is all about encouraging people to get better at writing, and also to try submitting, to learn about working with editors to improve stories and, ultimately, about getting published. How could we not give as many people as possible the chance to do that?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So we chickened out and accepted everything.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of course, this then meant we had more than forty stories to work with, and squeeze into a book. Which means we’ve created quite the chonker. But I feel it has been worth it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This did mean a lot of back and forth. Some people were new to getting editing notes, some had a stronger opinion of what their story should be, some were quicker to respond. All of which has made for quite an extended process.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But, from my Gallus experience, nothing excessive and I feel we now have a great collection.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Formatting, how I hate ye.<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Of course, a collection of Word documents is all well and good, but then someone has to pull it all into one file for publishing and this is where I have been doing most of my learning this time around.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It turns out that everyone has their own default story format and none of them, NONE of them, matches. Indenting, italics, em-dashes, quote marks, none of them match. Of course, when submitting stories to markets, nothing annoys me more than very prescriptive formatting requirements but, from the other side, I can see where editors are coming from. As every formatting choice is another opportunity for me to mess up the conversion to a single standard across the manuscript.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Which is where having a quality proof reader is essential, and luckily we’ve had that. Asking someone to read through over four hundred pages of text to spot where the em-dashes are inconsistent or I’ve missed off a full stop is daunting. But it is essential.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another thing I had to learn was the desktop publishing software, in this case Affinity, because it was free. A solid bit of kit for an inexperienced person like myself with a decent level of support online (and plenty of how-to videos) which would probably have worked a lot better if I hadn’t been running it on Linux via Wine. Still, it meant I could use the previous Gallus as a base template as a first step to hopefully produce something readable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It did generate a lot of swearing on my part, but I suspect that is par for the course, no matter the software choice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A few of those swears were caused when discovering that, on importing Word docs into Affinity, italics up and sod off. Apparently you can define a Word text style for the italics, and that will copy across like the other styles, but if you leave it to the Word default, it won’t. Which makes for quite the tedious manual job of reinstating them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Also important to keep an eye out for is quote marks, which tend to default to a neutral tick mark and not a directional inverted comma. Again, something that can then be fixed in Affinity, but a tedious bugger to do so.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The other thing I’ve found fun to learn about are ISBN numbers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It turns out that KDP lets you use a free, but only works on Amazon, number. Sounds lovely until you try to setup a launch in a proper bookshop or give a copy to a library and they can’t see it on their systems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To solve this, we had to buy our own, fully functional, ISBNs. And that is multiple, because a) paperbacks and ebooks require different ones and b) buying only two numbers is stupidly expensive. Does mean the Circle now has spare for future collections that I absolutely will not be working on. We can call it a long-term investment and put up with the silly cost.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Also joyful is that, once you buy some numbers, this does nothing but give you a warm feeling and let you fill in a box in KDP. You also have to register the numbers, with the same people you bought them from, but on a completely different website with a different login. And it’s slow, so best not done to a deadline. <side-eyes camera><\/p>\n\n\n\n

But, if you do all this, then, so I’m told, bookshops and libraries can then order it like a real book. However, this then means that KDP thinks your book is already published, and so won’t let you set a future launch date, meaning that I’ve had to jump through additional hoops to allow me to order up the copies for sale at the launch in October. Nothing is ever straightforward, it seems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Finally we have the question of a cover. Once again Jenni Coutts has offered us a glorious cover and we snapped her hand off accepting it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is a thing of beauty but one thing I had to learn for this was how to estimate the size of the book before it was made. And that is because this is a wraparound cover, which means the size changes if the number of pages changes. Which, of course, can change if I make any formatting decisions during production. And what you don’t want is for your artist to labour away to produce something lovely, only for you to tell them the size has changed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I only did that once, and luckily it was early on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Still, Jenni worked around my nonsense and here we have a great cover I’ll be deeply proud to wave at people and ask them for money.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"The<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

And so we get to the end of the process and, despite many hours checking the consistency of quote marks or ebook content lists, I think we may be there. There is a book, it has brilliant stories and passable formatting and soon it will be out in the world. I can only thank my fellow editors, our proofreader and all the writers for their patience and hard work. Any, and all, typos are my fault and I hope you will accept a hefty bribe of tablet at a launch to ignore them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I’ll be back soon with a third blog on what is in the collection, and how much I like it, and all about how you can get it. Cheers for now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This year marks forty years of the Glasgow SF Writer’s Circle and to celebrate this they are producing an anthology called Haverin. It is my “delight” to be one of the editors, following up on my helping out with the book released at the last Worldcon in Glasgow called Gallus. To note the release and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":3,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"federated","footnotes":""},"categories":[15,24,2,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-377","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blether","category-editing","category-huzzah","category-publication"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.munchkinstein.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/377","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.munchkinstein.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.munchkinstein.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.munchkinstein.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.munchkinstein.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=377"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.munchkinstein.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/377\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":392,"href":"https:\/\/www.munchkinstein.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/377\/revisions\/392"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.munchkinstein.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=377"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.munchkinstein.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=377"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.munchkinstein.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=377"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}