Short Fiction by Phil Barcio
In the 30th anniversary issue of Antipodean SF!
My short story Gift of the Brabblefly has been re-printed in the 30th anniversary issue of Antipodean SF (Issue #328)!
On this delightful occasion, I say this to editors of short fiction:
You are the invisible suns of the literary universe. You electrify the primordial writers ooze. Without your nurturing, most authors would languish forever as unpublished pupae, or give up and write for Netflix.
Gift of the Brabblefly was the first short story I ever got published. It’s the namesake of this newsletter. It benefited from the insight of two visionary editors, 15 years and a world apart.
The first was an editor at Space Squid, a sci-fi and humor magazine out of Austin, Texas. She accepted Gift of the Brabblefly for publication, pending my acceptance of a single revision — a six-word sentence she wanted to cut. It was a surgical edit that profoundly improved the flow and mood of the piece. It enlightened me to editorial potential.
The second was the publisher of Antipodean SF, a speculative sci-fi magazine based in Nambucca Heads, Australia. (Antipodean means diametrically opposed places. The North Pole is the antipode of the South Pole.) This editor, while preparing Gift of the Brabblefly for an Australian audience, requested another tiny edit, that again improved the story. I was re-enlightened to the power of editorial insight.
I had read this story hundreds of times over the years, torturing over every word, cutting everything that wasn’t the story. Yet, these editors quickly and easily found stuff I missed.
Capable editors don’t just find typos. They rip open the fabric of perception and hoist struggling writers through the gleaming hole...or something like that…I’ll have my editor take a look.