Progress report. I have read every entry to the anthology and eliminated stories that don’t match the theme well or just aren’t written well enough to compete with what’s left. Now comes the hard part.
I’m doing my second read through all the stories and ranking them in three categories. First, they get what I call a “shades of gray” ranking. It’s an intuitive measure of how dark or light I feel the story is.
Second, I am ranking the stories from 1 to 10 on how well I like the story as a stand-alone unit. Also very subjective.
Finally, I am ranking them from 1 to 10 on how well I feel the stories match my idea of the anthology theme.
I have 28 stories left in inventory and I need to cull about 40K of word count. Every one of those stories has potential to make the final table of contents, and almost all have the potential to be cut. There are about four stories that I have already decided will definitely be in the anthology, but I am waiting to notify the authors until I can do it all in one sitting.
