Interview With Erin MacKay
Erin MacKay is one of my proudest discoveries. Okay, it's fair to say that I didn't print her first story or anything like that, but her story, Crossing the Distance is the kind of story that I love to receive unexpectedly in the mail. It had great heart and Erin showed tremendous skill with POV, as well as just having gorgeous writing. The finished product is one of the standout stories in the Tangle anthology, getting raves from Ann Somerville at Uniquely Pleasurable, who everybody knows is a tough nut to crack.
But when the MS for Crossing was first submitted, it looked very different. I felt like had an unnecessary frame story attached and was confused about the ending. I wrote to Erin and asked her if she would be willing to consider rewrites and she agreed. The following work we did was some of my most rewarding work as an editor and because of that I wanted to talk about it with Erin here.
NK: So, Erin, the reason I wanted to talk about editing is that I feel like the editorial process is, to the new-to-publishing author, terrifying. Deeply shrouded in mystery the editrix is this cruel stranger who says they like your stuff, yet asks you to change almost every paragraph in some tiny way. I asked you for something outrageous: to change the entire end of your story. What made you decide to go ahead and work with me rather than withdrawing Crossing?
EM: Trest and Aev have existed in my mind and on my hard drive, in one form or another, for a long time. They’ve stayed with me through years and drafts, and figuring out the right way to tell their story became something of a mission. Obviously, I thought I had at least gotten close when I submitted Crossing to you, but I had never shaken the feeling that there was still work to be done. So when you offered to see where some revisions would take us, I leapt at the chance to work with someone with an editor’s objectivity but who also believed in the heart of the story. From our earliest exchanges, I trusted that we shared the goal of making Crossing the best it could be, and that no matter how big the changes seemed at first, it was all in the name of doing right by these characters.
NK: That's interesting. So what you are saying is that your sense of duty to the characters overrode any attachment that you had to individual words or scenes?
EM: That was definitely the driving force. It was hard, sometimes, to let go of a scene or a turn of phrase that I liked, but why keep it in if it’s not right for the story? I softened some of the blows by saving the cuts into a separate file. Some of them can be recycled for another story, but even if they can't, it helped to think they weren’t going away forever.
NK: In Crossing you use a really clever trick to extend limited third person POV into the minds of two separate characters via a psychic bond. Did you do that deliberately or was it more of an intuitive decision?
EM: I didn’t give the POV much conscious thought when I first started writing the story. Because the psychic bond was present in the characters from the start, the choice to use one character to channel the experiences of both came very naturally. It got a little awkward to work with in places, so yet another benefit of our editing process was thinking more carefully about POV and how to handle it. I think that aspect of the story cleaned up particularly well.
NK: So what other projects have you got going now?
EM: At the moment, I'm indulging myself in something longer. I'm still a sucker for the romance and mystery of creatures of the night, but I'm playing a little with what the monsters of our superstitions might really be, how they got here, and what they get up to in our world. And there's pretty men, of course...
NK: And since you didn’t mention it, I’ll add that Erin MacKay’s got a story called Cupcake that will be featured in the upcoming Blind Eye anthology, Tangle Girls. Thanks a lot for coming over! You can visit Erin at her website:
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kimnik) wrote,
curious
