For the past few weeks we've been working hard to pick submissions for Dust and Fire and it's been a fun experience. I'm one of those people who have a hard time saying no to anything, but I found it was easy to do that with these submissions. As with other groups, there were probably those obvious "no" pieces, and absolute "yes" pieces. I was afraid that I would not say no to enough pieces. (I remember I said no to an entire packet that was still on its first read.) We obvious had too many prose pieces in the end and had a dificult time narrowing it down to what we now have.
It was hard to decide what exactly was a no or a yes. I felt like I was using a mental number scale while rating each piece. Like 1 was a no and 10 was a yes. On a lot of pieces I felt like giving it a 7 or 8, or maybe a 3 or 4 and there was a lot of 5s. I felt that those pieces could have gone in there or they didn't and I had to look at it again and force myself to decide. Or I waited until other people said yes or no to make my decision.
It's hard being a first-timer because I'm unsure of what exactly we all want in the anthology. I guess I say that because I'm not a big advocate for much. That's probably makes me sounds boring, and if it does, too bad. If I absolute love something then I'll say something, but other than that, I don't care much. I look for things that I am interested in, things that I haven't experienced before. I enjoy learning new things. For example, there was a piece set in Duluth, MN. I was born there and have lived in or around Duluth for most of my life. I wasn't as interested in the piece as other submissions. Same as stories about winter, the outdoors or Bemidji. Don't get me wrong, if the writing was beautiful, I did enjoy it but not as much as others.
