Lesson learned.

It’s spam. Someone appears to have written a script that scrapes the text of a previous comment (this one is Jonathan’s) and then attaches a name, e-mail address and the spam link to it. I went in and “rescued” all of these comments from the pending folder an hour or so ago and then realized why they seemed so familiar and had to go back in and label them all spam.

For some reason this comment that arrived from “Amy” won’t post:

Angela,

Great interview. I’m hoping I can get to my review copy of Dispensations soon, now that I’m finally digging my way out from under another project that’s been eating up my spare time for months…

The editor’s job must be one of the most thankless in all of publishing, especially since (as you note) it tends to come at the expense of a person’s writing. Thanks for doing the hard work to put this together.

Edit: I changed the “review coming soon” to a link to the review

It seems as though authors of fiction set in the Mormon world but intended for a larger audience are in a similar situation (even though Mormon culture is real), so having an outsider character presumably has the potential to serve a similar function.

Yes. My books 1 & 2 are from an insider’s perspective, so I drop jargon in a context where the reader can pick up the gist without infodump.

But book 3 is from an outsider’s (first person) perspective, and one who has very few preconceived notions (that was a bit of self-indulgence on my part; in reality, I don’t think the narrator would have been that oblivious either to fact or fiction).

I plop her right into our world. The insiders tell her a few fundamentals, and she takes it from there. She observes and asks questions as the need arises.

[Aside: I had a little bit different problem with infodump because the core conflict involves a business deal I set up in book 1, which A) if you read book 1, you won't remember and B) if you didn't read book 1, you MUST understand. Just one of the nasties of writing a interconnected stories and/or series. Anyhoo, I had to infodump that pretty quick, but my first readers said it didn't sound infodumpy so I have to go on that. Still makes me uncomfortable, though...]

But yeah, the nonmember first readers REALLY got into it because they were exploring with the n00b narrator. It worked for them.

I’m of the opinion that if there is a good way to do it from the inside without an uninformed character used as a cipher for the reader to avoid infodump, I don’t know what it is and I’m not clever enough to find it.

I noticed that a high percentage of stories are from outsider perspectives — characters who are not LDS or on the outs with that heritage.

Fantasy and science fiction writers often have to figure out how to introduce the world they’ve created to readers without having their in-world characters do too much info dumping. One technique is to have a main character be an outsider in some respect, so that the reader can discover the world through that character’s eyes and thus have a less steep learning curve.

It seems as though authors of fiction set in the Mormon world but intended for a larger audience are in a similar situation (even though Mormon culture is real), so having an outsider character presumably has the potential to serve a similar function.

I’m surprised to hear that the collection was organized as randomly as it seems to have been. As I read along, I kept seeing (imagining?) brilliant strings tying it all together. I guess Angela isn’t genius after all. (Naw. She is)

A couple responses to specific points:

1) On authors putting their own stories in an anthology.

Angela, I feel like giving you a whack upside the head for even worrying about this.

It’s a very common practice, almost expected. (Not counting DISPENSATION, four of the five writer-edited anthologies I’ve been in have had stories by the writer/editor in them.)

As a reader, I always prefer anthologies with stories by the writer/editor. It gives me a benchmark for judging their selection criteria. It also indicates to me that if the author has a story in the book (particularly a new one crafted just for the anthology), the project was important to the author/editor personally (at least enough to spend time and effort writing for it) and the editor isn’t just phoning it in.

DISPENSATION is a much better book in several ways for having your story inside its pages.

2) On “outsider perspectives.”

Angela nails it: “LDS writers should be able to write from the point-of-view of all sorts of people … [and] all sorts of Mormon experiences.”

Amen. Outsider POV, insider POV, even my one anti-Mormon POV story (long, funny story behind that one) — I consider all of my work faithful Mormon literature. It’s a writer’s job to get inside the head of all kinds of characters. Even aliens!

– Lee