When I’m reading for the anthology I try to give an initial response within two days. I either reject the story or notify the author that I’m holding it. (The reading period is only four weeks, so I’m not tying up somebody’s story for long.) The stories I hold are ones that are right for Sword & Sorceress. They’re stories I want to buy and include in the anthology. The problem is that by the deadline, I have enough stories for two or three good anthologies. Marion had the same problem; when she died, at the time of the Sword & Sorceress 18 deadline, she was holding enough stories for three anthologies. I split them up into Sword & Sorceress 18, Sword & Sorceress 19, and Sword & Sorceress 20.

So I spent a large part of the day on Sunday going through the hold pile. The long stories went back first; when the word-limit is 90,000 I can’t fit too many 9,000-word stories. I start by taking a hard look at everything over 6,000 words. Usually I work down from there, but this year I got at least nine stories that fit in the “short and funny” category. I’ve been saying I can always use those–traditionally the anthology ends with one, but in previous years I’ve been lucky to get two of them. This year I got so many that I had to send some of them back, and it wasn’t an easy choice.  I also sent back ten stories by people who had sold to previous Sword & Sorceress anthologies. I hate rejecting stories by “MZB’s writers,” but there are approximately 400 of them, and a lot of them submit stories every year.

The final decisions remind me of an eye doctor’s exam, when he’s flipping lenses back and forth and asking, “Which is better: 1 or 2?” Frequently they’re so close that I’m saying, “Uh, 2?” or even “could you show me those again?” That’s what the final decisions are like: having to choose between pairs of stories that are both very good and that I really like. (Also, by then I’ve re-read the stories so many times that my eyes are really tired–another similarity to an eye exam.)

So I make the best choices I can, knowing that I’m returning a lot of really good stories. I hope that, when Sword & Sorceress 27 comes out this November, the readers will like the stories I finally chose  as much as I do.

This morning, when I should have been writing my blog entry for the week, I inadvertently attempted to multitask to the point of total overload. I had ten tabs open in the browser I was using, plus two other web browser programs, an e-mail program, MS Word and four spreadsheets running. It’s a wonder that my computer didn’t shut down before my brain did, victim to total confusion.

I finally noticed it was past lunchtime, so I got up from the computer (actually, I pried my stiffened body out of the chair and forced it to start moving again), ate lunch, and watched a movie I had recorded on TV last month–until I got bored and deleted it half-way through. Then I curled up on the sofa with a book (Fire and Hemlock by Diana Wynne Jones), and the next thing I knew, it was time for Vespers. So I’m writing my blog entry now, which means I’m finally achieving the third of five things I was really, really supposed to do today.

As soon as I post this, I’d better get back to the slush pile. I have four more days of that, and then I’ll be assembling Sword & Sorceress 27 and sending out contracts. I’m hoping that once that is done I’ll be able to do more of my own writing. I do still plan to finish the novel I’m working on, no matter how long–and how many rewrites–it takes me.

Marion loved reading slush. Raul, who picked up the mail on his way to work every morning, used to complain that she should at least say “good morning” before her demand “Is there any mail?” He finally managed to get “good-morning-Raul-is-there-any-mail?”

My job was to keep track of everything, and when it was all paper that was a big job. I can remember times when my bedroom had multiple stacks of manuscripts and different sized SASEs (Self-Addressed Stamped Envelopes). Yes, Marion had an office, but things were less likely to be knocked over and strewn across the floor in my bedroom. Electronic submissions are wonderful.

Actually the computer makes editing the anthology much easier. I have a spreadsheet, where I keep track of submission and their disposition, and a folder in the e-mail account where any submission that follows the guidelines will land automatically. So every day I open up the spreadsheet, go to the “Anthology-To Be Read” folder in the mailbox, and log in the submissions. Then I start reading them.

One of the most frequent reasons for rejecting a story is that I didn’t care about the characters. This doesn’t mean that it’s a bad story or that another editor won’t like it; it just means I’m not buying it for Sword & Sorceress. Marion had a rejection she called “convenient earthquake” for these, but I really don’t think it’s helpful to tell a writer that you don’t care if an earthquake swallows up their characters on the last page. Given that a secondary goal of the Sword & Sorceress anthologies is to encourage new writers, I try to make my rejections less brutal than Marion’s.

Another pretty much automatic rejection is for bad grammar. If I’m continually pulled out of the story by the fact that the writer has no clue how to use commas, I’m not going to buy it. If you want to be a writer, learn how to write! I’m an editor, not an English teacher. I strongly recommend The New Well-Tempered Sentence: A Punctuation Handbook for the Innocent, the Eager, and the Doomed by Karen Elizabeth Gordon. I have that, as well as The Deluxe Transitive Vampire: The Ultimate Handbook of Grammar for the Innocent, the Eager, and the Doomed with easy reach on the shelf above my computer.

A third major class of rejections are the stories that I read through to the end and then go “Ewwwww!” I know dystopian fiction is popular these days, but if I like your characters enough to follow them all the way through the story, I don’t want something horrible to happen to them on the last page.

Every year, however, I find stories that I love in the slush pile: stories with new ideas and stories with a new twist on old ideas. I find new writers who will be among my favorites for years to come. These are the times when I love my job. And these are the stories that will, God willing, keep me editing Sword & Sorceress into its fourth decade.

Sword and Sorceress 26–as well as volumes 22 through 25–are available from Amazon.com, Fictionwise, and Kindle. We hope to make volumes 1 through 21 available again too, but that’s a long-term project.

There are still books on how to write notes, such as The Art of Thank You and 101 Ways to Say Thank You, and there were rules that I was told about as a child. The one that made the least sense to me was “Don’t start a thank you note with the words ‘thank you’.” That just seems silly to me; both parties know that I’m thanking the giver for the gift. The biggest challenge I’ve found in thank you notes is the occasional difficulty of identifying the gift. As you can tell from the look on my face in the photo, I had no clue what that present was. (Actually, I still don’t know. Overalls, perhaps?)

These days, when I’m sending gifts to my sisters’ children, I’m happy to get any acknowledgement. Thank you notes now serve as a receipt, so I consider “Dear Aunt Lisa, Thank you for the card and the money…” to be a perfectly good note. I know they got their birthday presents, and I know that my sisters are passing on our family’s rules to the next generation. I hope when the time comes for me to be sending birthday presents to my great-nieces and nephews that I’ll still get notes–or at least e-mails.

• You can’t deduct more than the amount you won.
• You must have documentation of all losses.
• Losses are deductible only on Schedule A – Itemized Deductions

What this means is that gambling winnings go on the front of Form 1040, under “Other Income” and the losses may not be deductible at all. You can’t just say, “I won $4,000, but I lost $10,000, so I don’t have any real winnings.” You have $4,000 in winnings, and you may have $4,000 in deductions.

The reason I say “may” is that if you take the standard deduction ($5,800 for a single person in 2011), you can’t deduct the $4,000 at all.

If you have enough other Schedule A items (medical expenses, taxes, mortgage interest, etc.)  that the additional $4,000 gives you more than the standard deduction, then the part that’s greater than the standard deduction is an additional deduction.

The only way the entire $4,000 is deductible is if you already have enough Schedule A items that you would be itemizing anyway. Even then, there’s still one catch. The winnings are part of your AGI (Adjusted Gross Income), which is used to figure limitations on other items on your tax return, including your medical expenses deduction, so the deduction doesn’t quite cancel out the income, even if you take all of it.

So as well as the old advice “Don’t bet more than you can afford to lose,” I would add, “Don’t win more than you can pay taxes on.” And have the casino deduct income tax from your winnings. Come tax season, you’ll be glad you did.

The only time I collected unemployment, it was something one got for a month or two between jobs, because it didn’t take all that long to find a new job. Obviously, this experience was not recent. Because the period of unemployment was brief and ended with new employment, it didn’t matter if you had taxes withheld from your check or not; by the time the tax bill came due, there would be money to pay it. But now, in my volunteer work, I’m seeing people who received unemployment compensation for quite a while and owe a significant amount of tax on it (and when you don’t have income, it doesn’t take a large amount of tax to be considered quite significant). If I were getting unemployment compensation today, I would definitely have Federal Income Tax withheld from it. (In California, unemployment compensation is not taxable, so at least it’s not a problem on state income tax returns.)

Then last week the 1940 US Census was released. Each census has some questions that are unique to it, and in 1940 there was an entire section on employment status–as opposed to the earlier ones, which just asked for a person’s profession. Here’s what was asked in 1940:
21. Was this person AT WORK for pay or profit in private or non-emergency Govt. work during week of March 24-30?
22. If not, was he at work on, or assigned to, public EMERGENCY WORK (WPA, NYA, CCC, etc.) during week of March 24-30?
 If neither at work nor assigned to public emergency work
23. Was this person SEEKING WORK?
24. If not seeking work, did he HAVE A JOB, business, etc.?
25. Indicate whether engaged in home housework (H), in school (S), unable to work (U) or other (Ot)
If at private or non-emergency Government work (“Yes” in Col. 21)
26. Number of hours worked during week of March 24-30, 1940
If seeking work or assigned to public emergency work (“Yes” in Col. 22 or 23)
27. Duration of unemployment up to March 30, 1940 – in weeks

I wonder how similar the answers to question 27 would be if we changed “1940″ to “2012.” I also think it’s a shame that we don’t have something like the WPA now. WPA projects included the highway I drove to graduate school (four nights a week after work), several of the libraries I’ve used, a building that is now one of my favorite restaurants in San Francisco, and the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles. We could use projects like that again.

Of course, the dates do matter. Things change over time, from social attitudes (my early Massachusetts ancestors would have found my religious beliefs totally unacceptable, and my Pennsylvania Quaker ancestors would not have been thrilled either, although they would have been unlikely to hang me for them), to clothing,  to geography. Tomorrow the 1940 US Census will be released, an event I have been waiting for ever since the 1930 Census was released (demonstrating that a man I knew who claimed to have been born in September 1930 was actually born in 1928–and this is not the only instance I’ve seen of a person appearing in a census before their alleged date of birth). Ancestry.com, bless them, is including enumeration district maps, which will make it much easier to find your ancestors, especially at first, when the census will not have an index (first they load all the images, which is going to take time, and then they do an index, which takes a lot more time). I pulled up the map of the area where I lived as a child and discovered that my neighborhood wasn’t there. The land was, of course, but the streets didn’t exist; I suspect it was either farmland or woods.

This should not be surprising. I grew up in a neighborhood where the streets were named after admirals and generals who had distinguished themselves during World War II, and when the 1940 Census was taken, World War II was just starting. It had begun in Europe the previous September, but the US was not yet at war. My grandparents had fought in World War I (known at that time as “The Great War”); World War II was to be my parents’ war. My father joined the Navy and was stationed in the Pacific, on a boat so small that some of the surviving ones are used for the Circle Line tours around Manhattan.  My female ancestors didn’t fight–my mother was only twelve in 1940–but my grandmothers rolled bandages and knit socks, and everyone coped with rationing. I still have the remains of the family ration books, and my late mother’s still has a dozen stamps for coffee. Even if I didn’t know that she drank tea, I could gather from this that she wasn’t much of a coffee drinker. The gasoline ration card was in my grandmother’s name rather than my grandfather’s, reminding me that she was usually the one who drove, although I don’t know why. My great-grandmother’s middle name is written as “Tracer” (it was actually Teresa)–did she still have a strong Swedish accent? I know that she was eleven when her family came here, but she was working as a “domestic” by the time she was fifteen, so I don’t think she spent much time in school learning English. And it wouldn’t have seemed strange to her to leave her family to work as a maid-servant at fifteen; her mother had done the same, back in Sweden.

Speaking of employment (or unemployment), the US was coming out of the Great Depression in 1940, so there are new questions on the census about whether each person was working, seeking work, doing “emergency work” in various government programs (WPA, NYA, CCC, etc.). There’s a question about duration of unemployment, and also a question on level of education–obviously the idea that education is connected with employment is not new. This census focuses on work in a way that previous ones didn’t begin to. I’m really looking forward to what I’ll learn from it; I’m sure I’ll find surprises.

In order to achieve objective B, you can file a Form W-4, checking the “Married” box and claiming a high number of allowances. But use some restraint. For example, if you claim ten allowances, your employer may send your form to the IRS, which will then request documentation of your non-working spouse and your eight children or equivalent. If they find out that you are single and have no dependents… Well, there may be things the IRS finds amusing, but I’m betting this isn’t one of them.

As long as you don’t owe the IRS $1000 or more when your return is done, which approach you choose is a matter of personal preference. If you do owe them that much, they start charging interest and penalties. I’m volunteering with AARP Tax-Aide this year, so I’ve seen a lot of variations on tax withholding. And for a writer, getting enough withholding to avoid penalties can be tricky.

If you have a day job (or a spouse with a day job), you can change withholding by filing a new Form W-4. If you’re married, you can still check the box that says “Married, but withhold at higher Single rate.” You can set the number of allowances lower, down to 0. If you want more than the Single-0 amount withheld, you can specify an additional amount to be withheld from each paycheck.

But the first thing you have to do is figure out how much you are going to make during the coming tax year. We can all do that, right? OK, you can stop laughing now.

You can generally get around this problem by making sure that your payments for this year’s taxes are 100% of your tax for last year. After all, you never know when your sales are going to make a sudden jump. (The most surprised person when MISTS OF AVALON became a best-seller was Marion Zimmer Bradley, who wrote it.)

For more detailed instructions, see Form 1040-ES and, if applicable, the corresponding form for your state.

And finally: Never forget that your tax return is not the place to exercise your creative writing skills. If your return is fiction, the statute of limitations does not apply, and the IRS can come after you for the rest of your life–and probably beyond.

So the story came back to me, and I rewrote it to remove any elements belonging to the original world. This happens occasionally–you write something intended for a specific world and then have to remove it from that world.  (Marion’s Lythande story “The Wandering Lute” was originally written for the MAGIC IN ITHKAR series–as a sequel to my story “Cold Spell,” but it was rejected on the grounds that there wasn’t enough of Ithkar in it. They were right; it was very easy to remove the Ithkar references.)

The type of line I was using was network cable, because I had been studying computer networking. At the time the standard for copper twisted-pair wiring was Category 5 (called Cat 5, of course), and the upgrade to Category 6 was beginning. I wondered what this would be like with actual cats, and that was the starting idea for my story.

I considered looking for a new anthology for the story, but the Marion Zimmer Bradley Literary Works Trust had already published Kindle versions of quite a few cat stories: Raul S. Reyes’ and my “ConnectiCat” from Andre Norton’s CATFANTASTIC III; Mercedes Lackey’s Shipscat Collection (and the original four stories that are collected in it); and Catherine Soto’s The Temple Cats, five stories from SWORD & SORCERESS 21-25. So I decided to add “Line Dancing“ to the group of “MZB’s” cat stories for the time being. I like the world I ended up with, so I may write more stories in it.

“Line Dancing” is currently available from Kindle. It will be free on the day this blog is published, Tuesday, March 20, 2012.

Then, about the time I finished college, the Episcopal Church started modernizing the prayer book. There were several experimental versions; I remember something called “the zebra book” because of its striped cover. By 1979 there was a new official Book of Common Prayer, which was designed to give parishes more flexibility in their worship. It has several forms for the communion prayer (the consecration), six forms of the Prayers of the People,  etc. But I frequently wonder if the committee that produced this book really intended for this flexibility to extend to the Creed.

The Nicene Creed written during the 4th century. The Latin version begins “Credo in unum Deum…” and the word “creed” comes from Credo.  Credo translates to “I believe”; “we believe” would be credimus. But the version now used in my church starts with “We believe”–and, judging from what I hear every Sunday, I don’t think we all believe the same thing. I routinely hear things that would have had my fellow parishioners burned at the stake during the Middle Ages, even though we are still allegedly using the same creed they used then.

I’m getting used to hearing the feminine pronoun used for the Holy Spirit, though why they couldn’t just have left that section in the passive voice so the question wouldn’t arise is beyond my comprehension. I am not going to discuss the argument over whether the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son or just from the Father. But there are people using the feminine pronoun for Jesus. I think we all agree that he was a historical person, who was born in a human body, circumcised, lived for a little over three decades around other people, and was crucified, at least half-naked, on a cross. That’s certainly what I was taught. Wouldn’t somebody–or a lot of somebodies–have noticed if he were female?

I know what “I believe,” but I don’t think I have a clue as to what “we believe.”