Bradley Sands

Editor, Bust Down the Door and Eat All The Chickens.

May 2007

Bradley Sands writes absurdist comedies that demolish the walls of reality. He lives in Northampton, MA, where he edits Bust Down the Door and Eat All the Chickens (A Journal of Absurd and Surreal Fiction). He experienced enlightenment after walking into a bookstore and being shocked to see his picture on the cover of Your Four-Year-Old: Wild and Wonderful.

How did you become an editor? How was Bust Down the Door and Eat all The Chickens founded?

I started out working for Weird Tales as an unpaid assistant editor. I had a friend from college who worked there and he recommended me for the position.

As for Bust Down the Door and Eat All the Chickens, I became involved with it after meeting Jim Gardner, its editor/publisher, when he tried to sell me a copy of it in a library. I looked inside and noticed that a lot of the contributors were the small press authors that I had been reading at the time (they're now known as authors of bizarro fiction). We hit it off. A few weeks later, he asked me if I wanted to take the journal over. At that time, he had only produced one issue.

As far as I can recall, Jim started the journal sometime after coming into contact with polycarp kusch on the internet. Polycarp founded

www.absurdist.cc a site for posting absurd stories (which Jim wrote). After realizing that other people wrote that sort of thing, he decided to publish a journal devoted to it.

Congratulations on your novel It Came from Below the Belt. How does being a writer affect your thinking behind editing and vice versa?

Thanks. Since I'm a writer, I prefer to publish stories that I'm incapable of writing. Also, authors score extra points whenever I read something that feels as if they've put as much work into it as I put into my own writing. I don't think very highly of stories that seem as if they were cranked out in an hour our two. And sending out rejection letters always puts me in a bad mood because I know exactly how the writers are going to feel after receiving them.

It's difficult to write after I've been editing. I end up being too critical of myself and find it almost impossible to get anything done. I'm always like that to a lesser extent, so I think that editing has rubbed off on me. I usually edit while I'm writing rather than after like most people, so my process is a bit difficult.

What do you like to see in a cover letter?

It doesn't matter to me. Words spelled correctly. And a bio (unless they put it in the document). My guidelines ask for a bio, so when somebody doesn't include one, I assume they haven't read the guidelines over carefully. I suspect a lot of authors don't send bios because they don't have any publishing credits. In that case, it's perfectly fine for them to write something simple like where they live, or something goofy.

What makes a manuscript stand out for you?

When it's well-written, entertaining, and grabs my attention from the very first sentence.

What is your biggest pet peeve about slush pile manuscripts? Feel free to rant.

When an author submits a story that isn't appropriate for the journal. The majority of the submissions that we get are like that. I'm convinced that most people don't read the guidelines in full. Beyond that, I like it when authors read an issue before submitting. Since the last thing an author wants to hear in a rejection letter is "We suggest that you buy an issue to familiarize yourself with the type of material that we publish," my website contains an online issue (#2) in the form of a PDF. I believe that reading a few stories from it will do the trick.

What the best advice you can give a new writer?

Keep writing and wait a few years before submitting your work because it probably isn't going to be publishable. If you need other people to read your work in order to motivate yourself to write, do something like joining a writing workshop, posting your stories on an online workshop, or making a zine full of your stories (either in print or online).Keep reading. The more good stuff you read, the better your writing will be. A writer who doesn't read won't be very good at it.

What are your feelings about market guides drawing a line between pro and non-pro markets. IE. Does it help or hinder writers and magazines.

I think that when an author is ready to send a story out for consideration, they should first make a list of the appropriate markets in the order of pay rates. They should start out by sending it to the mag at the top. If they get rejected, they should send it to the next one on the list, and keep going like that. The more a magazine pays, the more people will end up reading your story. Higher rates mean that more readers are buying it. And a higher circulation, better distribution, and that they have more money for advertising.

But if your story doesn't really fit anywhere, then you may want to send it to a lower paying market like mine. Although that doesn't guarantee it would be a good fit there. So I think it's helpful for the writer to distinguish between paying and non-paying markets.

Your guidelines say that submissions to your magazine "should not fit comfortably within any genre." How do genres help or hinder writers, editors and publishing houses?

Genres are great for marketing. If a consumer knows the sort of genre that they enjoy reading, it makes it a lot easier for them to locate a book that would be satisfied with. Genres help the editors of genre magazines because it makes it easier for them to locate stories that would be a good fit for their mags. Genres hinder the imaginations of writers, making it seem okay to recycle the ideas of the writers that have come before them rather than create something new.

Thank you!