An Interview with Bridget and Marti McKenna

In this brief interview, editors Bridget and Marti McKenna answer a few questions about their e-zine, Æon.

Tell us a bit about yourself. Background, education, etc.

Marti: Having come through the U.S. public education system, I can safely say I have very little formal education. I was lucky to get a writing job at smallish computer game company (Sierra Online) back in the ’80s and that led to a 20-year career writing for the entertainment software industry. Meanwhile, I wrote sf/f, published a little, and raised my daughter, Jessie. In 2000, Mom and I launched Scorpius Digital Publishing, in an attempt to be a part of the e-book revolution. Unfortunately, the revolution was postponed, but we published 80+ titles while we waited.

Bridget: I’m similarly light in the formal education department, but like Marti I began writing and editing for computer games in the late ’80s—maybe ten years after I started selling fiction.

As Marti said, our first publishing venture was a casualty of the times. But if we’d known there wasn’t going to be an e-book revolution at the time, we’d never have started publishing, and we’d have missed learning a lot of valuable stuff.

What gave you the idea to start Æon?

Marti: It’s all Mom’s fault. She said, “I’ve got an idea….” I’ve always been a sucker for that line, and she knows it. We sketched out a plan one afternoon on a Seattle bus, and by the time we arrived at point B, we were magazine editors. I think part of the thought was that while books in electronic formats weren’t getting a lot of attention, short fiction in those formats was beginning to win awards. Maybe this was an area where we could make an impact.

Bridget: It was my fault; I started making notes about whether it was even possible to publish an e-zine with any possibility of success, and told Marti I’d convince her of it before the bus got us home. It didn’t take nearly that long. This was spring of 2004, and SCI FICTION was still in operation, and there’d been e-zine stories on the Nebula final ballot for two years running. Of course neither of us is Ellen Datlow, and we didn’t have The Sci-Fi Channel’s pockets, but we’re always game for a hare-brained scheme, and with five months to put together the website and the first issue in time for World Fantasy, this was about as hare-brained as they come.

What is it like putting out a typical issue, or is there a typical issue?

Marti: We do it all via web and email. We have a blind submission process, which means that only the first reader knows the author’s name in most cases. Our Editorial Assistant, Stacey Janssen, logs stories into a web system and assigns them to one of us to read. The system strips out the author’s name so recognition or lack thereof won’t distract us from the story. Once we’ve purchased a story, it waits around for me to give it an editing pass, which usually requires one or two rounds with the author. Then it’s on to Mom for typesetting.

Bridget: The routine is typical, and only varies when Marti finds a better way to do something; she’s in charge of better ways—I’m in charge of plowing along with the old way until she does. It’s the content of the issues that keeps us doing this, and the authors are in charge of that. Our authors are nothing short of wonderful. We’re pretty proud of the fact that many of the people who’ve sold us stories have sold us two or three or four. Æon Fourteen, the issue we just put out, has five returning authors; that’s a record for us, and we’re delighted by it.

When choosing stories, what are you looking for?

Marti: We asked ourselves that first day on the bus, “What are we looking for, and how can we describe it?” We came up with this: We want to publish speculative fiction stories that kick our (collective) ass. We don’t have any hard-and-fast rules (i.e., no dog stories), we just want a story to work for us on all those levels that make you say “Ah!” when you read it.

Bridget: What she said.

Is there something you’re not seeing that you’d like to?

Marti: There are a lot of great sf/f authors out there who haven’t yet submitted stories to us, so we’d love to hear from them. Oh, and money. We don’t see nearly enough of that. Buy Æon!

Bridget: Poems. We’re short on kick-ass speculative poetry at the moment. Besides that and lots more money, it’s hard to say. We get a wide variety of fantasy and SF and what some people like to call “slipstream,” though I’ve never quite figured out what that means to me, and I don’t really care. If it kicks our ass, we’re very likely to buy it.