Mooncalves and NO Press, Five Months In
Responsibilities, transparencies, volitions, things of that nature
For the last several months, in addition to chipping away at my novel (descriptive WIP title: The Sun Novel) and various bits of short fiction, I’ve been putting time and money into NO Press, a new imprint which is being built alongside its first release: an anthology called MOONCALVES. I’ve been pretty quiet about it; aside from a Twitter promo profile and a Wordpress url that I’m parked over, it does not have an online presence.
Despite that partial ghostliness, it has been moving at a fair clip. It’s my intent to be as transparent as possible with this process, as aside from some very invaluable advice given to me by veteran editor/publishers at Crystal Lake Publishing, Centipede Press and Tartarus Press, I’m mostly operating from on my own instinct and sense of propriety.
The goal here is to honor writers, both those who arrive on the Mooncalves TOC and those who don’t. Aside from a tight circle of horror writers here in Denver, this has been an invitation-only venture. Every person from whom I’ve solicited has done good work, and being an editor has given me perspective as an often-frustrated writer (as though there were any other kind): all the work I have received thus far has been good, but not all of it has fit into Mooncalves. More on that in a bit.
As of the end of October 2021, I’ve officially bought and paid for eight stories. They are:
“Night, When Windows Turn to Mirror” by Christi Nogle
“Distant Signals” by Adam Golaski
“The Debauch” by Elwin Cotman
“Privacy” by Steve Rasnic Tem
“The Tomato” by Ernest Ogunyemi
“Beyond the Chain” by L. Marie Wood
“Sundered” by Thomas Mavroudis
“Destinationland” by Glen Hirshberg
All of these folks were contacted pretty early in the process (around May to June of 2021) and submitted well before the soft deadline of December 2021 which still looms ahead of us. I have another three writers who I’ve formally accepted stories from but who are still tinkering with their drafts / haven’t signed contracts.
Once I realized I’d netted ten names, I put myself in check and deferred on the remaining two-thirds of page space until December; About twenty-one writers are still in the process of writing drafts or are awaiting the “second round” of acceptances. As a matter of course I refrain from naming anyone until they’ve been paid.
All told, the so-far confirmed stories amount to roughly 36,768 words, out of a planned-ish 90,000 (which would put me at 300 pages or thereabouts). I pay $.05/word and disburse it ASAP following contract signing, which means I’ve paid roughly $1,838.40 so far. That’s come out of my pocket, which I’m happy with. In August of this year I took out a loan, one that I knew I could manage, in order to support the broader project from design to print. Cover design (it’s up there at the top of this post) is by the inimitable HR Hegnauer, working from Odilon Redon’s paintings (HR also made the NO Press title and logo, at the bottom of this post) and when the full manuscript is in, I hope to have HR design the interior of the book as well. I’ve also commissioned the wonderful Justine Neuberger to create graphite endsheet art. I don’t know what it will look like yet, but I am thrilled and terrified by the possibilities.
I moved my initial forecast of publishing from January 2023 to March 2023, mainly owing to a few drafts I’ve been promised through April or May of next year. I wanted to give myself a fair bit of breathing room between the submission of those drafts, which will cement, in one way or another, the full finished manuscript, and the actual retail release for the book, such as it is and will be.
The fact that the printing industry is under pretty extreme torsion in the near term adds some uncertainty to what I’ll be capable of in the next year, but I’m not that worried. The budget is there, and the book will happen. I do intend to release a time-delayed digital version - through this process I have benefited immensely from accessibility tools that I wouldn’t have, had it all been done via paper only, and I would hate to deny readers those same tools. I hope to fund a professional-grade audio production of the anthology as well. But for the moment, my focus is on making the print version a reality.
As far as the business side of NO Press goes… I undertook this project with the full expectation that it would be something I ate the costs for, absent any and all recoupment. If I have one mission here, it’s to get my collaborators paid. Ideally Mooncalves sells like hotcakes and I make some of my costs back, but I have to be inured to the possibility of it being a quiet debut. My control of the marketplace is limited; I can control getting my artists paid. If the printing industry goes haywire and producing the book becomes somehow impossible, that’s embarrassing to me, but the writers will have their money and their stories both. If the USPS neutralizes revenues via shipping fees, whatever. I pay writers on acceptance, not publication. They won’t suffer for my foolishness.
My hope is to continue NO Press into more and many-splendored books — more than likely, not anything as lavish as I hope Mooncalves will be. I have ideas. Who can say whether I or NO will live to see them realized.
Speaking as an editor, the way Mooncalves has developed has been strange to me. This is perhaps because I have never really been an editor before.
I have my pretentions as a writer; it’s all well and good for me to claim that a story or a novel, at some crucial point, develops into a thing with its own desires and demands, such that when I make choices I would otherwise be ambivalent about they can still feel “right” in some other way. It’s not up to me! Back in February 2020 I recalled watching a dear friend work on her art:
When I was in college, and fell in with the grifter who would shape and detail my life for a period of about two years, I met one of my best friends, Wildrose, a fashion design major and visual artist. We would meet at a coffee shop off-campus between classes, and I would read, or not read, and she would draw. Sometimes it would be a garment design, but usually it was just a sketch of something she saw, or something to keep her hands busy.
I loved those times - I tell her this often - not because I’m nostalgic for those turbulent times (though I am) but because I had very rarely been in the presence of a creative spirit before, and it was a balm to watch her work. Taking the ephemeral image in one’s mind and making it real, on paper, it was as literal transmutation as I could imagine, turning nothing into something.
…
There’s that sublime thing that I want to see in art — that thing that upon reading gnostics and experimenting with psychedelics I want to call immanence. The work, like a child over time, becomes upright and possessed with a sense of self I have to honor.
As a writer, a story can compel me to conform to its demands, and that can be thrilling, in its weird way. I can entertain the notion of the work as a separate being I wrestle with because I’ve got nobody to justify such fancies to but myself. But as an editor? When the anthology is telling me to tell other writers to conform to its demands? That’s different. I can’t make myself to be, simply, an interlocutor between the writer and the work. The work isn’t mine, and I’m the one deciding whether it appears in my print (and whether it’s paid for).
That’s heavy shit, for sure. And as I wrote earlier, I have a deeper understanding of what was once only a cognitive acknowledgement of the editor’s position; I could read “this story unfortunately isn’t for us” and think sure it wasn’t and get on with my life and the next rejection. But then I’m not making a living of writing, and I have no grand ambitions — dreams, yes, but not ambitions, the difference being whether I seriously expect myself to achieve them. As an editor I’m the guy telling a writer who’s put time and energy and hope into the work — good work! — that it’s “not right”?
But there’s that immanent thing, Mooncalves, speaking to me. I embarked with no hard and fast theme, beyond “strange stories”. That’s still true of the anthology as it’s developed, but it’s not the whole truth. When I first sent out solicitations to my dream contributors, there was stuff in the pitch about philosophies of horror, Mark Fisher’s articulation of the weird / uncanny, “is there something wrong with the world or is there something wrong with me?”, etc. and so forth. These things were vague but I was the editor, the things I said had weight and affected the work as it was made. I know that now. I had notions of what the anthology might look like and was trying to express those things.
Over the last month in particular, those early musings, which seemed innocuous at the time, have taken on a tinge of the cavalier. Because they ended up mattering far less than the elements which emerged later in the process of editing.
I’ve described the identity of a work as it develops in fairly woo terms up to this point, as a kind of spirit that manifests in the fetish object. But the truth is that the identity of Mooncalves is not ineffable or eldritch, it is exhibited, and concretely so, through the work. That is to say I made early decisions as to story acceptances — and to be clear I regret none of them, I love all the stories that I’ve chosen — and as soon as the work became real in part, the shape of the gestalt-to-be-completed changed.
Something that I think about often as I edit Mooncalves is how, apart from just getting my writers paid, I want to make a cohesive anthology of original work even without a discrete theme. I have always loved reading anthologies (in correspondence with Adam Golaski around the genesis of this project, I realized that they were most of what I read, and that I anticipated new ones the way normal people anticipated new novels). But they have a reputation, in some circles, as little more than reprint sampler plates, or depositories for trunk stories and the proverbial loose b-sides from single-author collections. Magazines and semi-pro zines got the good stuff, anthologies quietly sweeped up the rest.
In other words, “uneven” seems to be the watch word when it comes to anthologies. As a first-time editor, can I promise a perfect demonstration of why they’re underappreciated? No, not really. Instead I am trying to be conscious of what the stories that get accepted to Mooncalves open up to the rest of the book.
I am looking, if you’ll allow me a return to the woo, for resonances, elements in one story from one author that, in the right configuration, echo and amplify similar elements in another story from yet another author. Mood, concept, thematic preoccupation. That’s how you get a grab bag of excellent stories and turn them into a gestalt. That’s how you get a great anthology. And those are the things that you have to rely upon when you have a glut of strong stories worth publishing and only so much space: You have to see if what’s new fits, in that semi-ineffable way, with what’s already there, whether it builds toward some gestalt. The problem is that there’s no good way of conveying, in advance, how author submissions can achieve that.
It really is a question of fit. Nothing about this process reflects on the quality of a declined work. I just couldn’t make it fit. I wish that I could.
(Of course I should note that really, there’s nothing wrong with a grab bag of excellent stories. That’s how they did it in the 80’s, for the most part. And most of those editors are still around, right?)
I was going to write more here about the editor’s prerogative, their duties, what I’ve learned and agonized over… but this post is overlong as it is. I’ll leave it here - thank you to all the writers who’ve sent stuff in, to Lauren O’Neal for her excellent proofreading, to Evelyn Hampton for treating me like I’m not a scatterbrained lunatic, and to Adam for suggesting the anthology in the first place, when I was hemming and hawing over the time commitments of a hypothetical quarterly periodical.
I have loved this, even the hard parts. I can’t wait for it to become finalized, and for everyone to read it. I promise that it will be worth reading.