It’s Ladies Night in the little town of Foggy Hollow. You won’t be attending, of course, not yet, not until you get the curse. Your mom, and all of your girlfriends and their moms, will be out painting the town red tonight while you sit home alone, doing your algebra homework at the kitchen table. Being a late bloomer just isn't fair, you think.

What had been a light pitter-patter of rain quickly turns into the drumming of a torrential downpour. You get a small sense of satisfaction in knowing it’ll be cold and wet in the woods tonight. But you still wish like crazy that you were out there with the other women.

The creature’s face reminded Malia of a wolf. Sharp teeth lined an elongated snout covered with down, and a short beard clung to its chin. Its eyes, set forward in its face, were closed, and its tufted ears, although pointed, seemed relaxed.

Feathers on one side of an outstretched wing melded from light gray to dark gray on the other side of the wing. Blood covered its right shoulder.

Feathers gave way to down on its face and barreled chest, but that was the only thing soft about the Jegudun. It had squat, heavily muscled legs, and arms separate from its wings. An outstretched, human-like hand ended in curved, sharp claws that could easily tear flesh.

Perhaps I was also searching for the truth behind my mother’s tales. Fairy tales, some straight out of the annals of classic folklore, some loosed from the tightly wound spindle of her memories, ten, twenty generations old, passed down through the women of her family. Stories of the Fae. Of course I believed them as a boy. I was a young prince who cared nothing for castles nor riches if at the end of the day I could not find my mother’s arms, and her tales. Over time, though, I grew into reason. My mother’s face, bruised with the seal of my father’s massive ring, swam through my dreams as if to prove her every fable wrong. She was the heroine of her own story, the gentle maiden bound to a cruel king, and there would be no happy ending.

“So like, you just fix all the typos and then you get to have your name on the cover?”
At first I was angry – No. No I don’t just fix all the typos and then I get my name on the cover. That’s not how this works – but eventually I got over it, because Jack wasn’t trying to minimize the amount of work I put into an anthology, he honestly just didn’t know.
Thinking about it afterward it became pretty clear to me that, actually, a lot of people don’t know. When they see a book that says ‘Edited by NAME’ on the cover, they don’t understand what that means. And why should they? I’ve been a writer for quite a long time and even I didn’t know what that meant until a couple years ago, so I want to talk, just briefly, about my process when I’m editing an anthology. What do I do? Why is my name on the cover?

I am not an extremely picky editor. I don't immediately discount a submission based on a missing apostrophe or a misplaced comma. That's what editing is for--on my part. And posts with errors do end up on EC, including ones I've written, which is why I am not harsh on others in this regard. To write is to err.
But I am shocked by how many submissions I receive in which even rudimentary editing is missing. I suspect some people are lazy, some are bad at catching their own errors, and a great many others figure that EC is "just about fairy tales" and high standards aren't necessary.

John Campbell and many other editors have shown that editors too, can be agents of change in science fiction and society.  In my role as volume editor and Far Orbit anthologist, I was uniquely positioned to set the tone for the anthology.  Rather than writing about my preferences for more optimism, I decided to pay people for their optimistic SF stories. 

Writers are the gods of their own stories. We wield the power to say what we want, how we want. An editor or critic can recommend changes, but writers possess the awesomely seductive power to ignore them. This is one of the greatest dangers of being a writer: the ability to reject good advice. At the time, it’s tempting to think the critic just didn’t read something the right way, or to defend that clever turn of phrase we’re so proud of. Sometimes, we even fall back on the crutch of “this is my style” rather than honestly engage what an editor/critic is trying to tell us.

Since an anthology is a collection of short stories by various authors, it is usually centered around a theme. That theme may be broad—the theme of Speculative Story Bites is "speculative fiction under 4000 words"—or it may be narrow--for example, Rhonda Parrish's anthology Corvidae is focused on fantasy stories about crows, magpies, and other "corvid" birds, and Kate Wolford's anthology Frozen Fairy Tales is all about fairy tale retellings set in winter. At this point, the editor and publisher must also decide on guidelines for writers, including how long or short a story can be, what genres are acceptable, and how much writers will be paid.