Not really. But Antimatter ePress was.
Eurocon happened last week in Kiev, Ukraine.
When I got home from RavenCon, there were a series of increasingly panicked emails from a some-times client called Corrieo do Fantastico, a European SF magazine. (I was on the road all day monday) They wanted to have me copyedit some short stories for readability in English for a small publication which would showcase the depth and breadth of European SF, to be made available to the attendees of EuroCon.
*Nerdgasm.*
Getting those copyedited and ready for them was 13 hours non-stop Monday/Tuesday. (35,000 words, 13 hours.)
After they sorted out the TOC and collected the last few bios/photos, they wanted me to create the ePub as well. Ok, that’s fine.
15 hours later with cross-oceanic back and forth corrections, they had an ePub, mobi and PDF for the participants of the EuroCon.
No, it’s not a perfect work. :p There must be more typos and I don’t like some of the formatting on the ePub, but for such a fast turn around, a multi-national collaborative effort, it’s a pretty cool thing.
Some of the stories are translated or written by a non-native English speaker, and were really hard to work. As a teacher of English to adult refugees to the US, I’m more comfortable than most in this sort of half-way pidgin-lingo sort of not-really-English. But correcting to a grammatically correct lingua franca, that doesn’t sound translated, and without also mis-representing the author’s intent? Especially when I didn’t have that author there, sitting with me, able to discuss the story? Whoo. That was a whole new level of editing, and really hard work for me. I was presented with the problem of “an English speaker would never say that”, or “all these words are English, but in this combination, they are not English”. And so forth.
In this anthology, I don’t have a favorite story. They were all equally of interest. Bing, Bing Larissa was really a head-wrapper, a story told through the academia of finance. The Dead Orchards=Creepfest. News From A Dwarf Universe took the longest to edit, it still retains its original lingual flavor. Well, maybe I like The Royal Library the best, if you’re going to twist my arm.
This is an interesting collection, these are definitely stories that would not be told by an American author. Maybe I’m imposing that assessment, knowing that this is a European anthology, but go read and tell me what you think.
Here, they tell you about the project and provide download links:
http://internationalsf.wordpress.com/2013/04/19/anthology-of-european-sf/
(Note: I didn’t get paid for this. It’s a voluntary concept, whereby I –in Ohio– get to participate in the European Science Fiction Convention and promote Science Fiction as a genre by the work I do.)
