VISITING DIGNITARY/SENIOR EDITOR MELISSA SINGER

Ladies and gentlemen, I want to take a minute to do a bit of a special introduction for our Visiting Dignitary this week.  Melissa Singer is our editor, the editor at Tor who has worked with us for several years and gives us the kind of advice that is sometimes hard to hear but ALWAYS makes the book better.  She is a wonderful person, too, and I feel absolutely privileged to work with her.  She even took time from her hectic schedule to stop by and do a blog post.  So please give her an especially warm welcome.  I give you - Melissa Singer.

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Melissa Ann Singer is a Senior Editor at Tor/Forge Books, where she has worked for more than 25 years. She began her career in publishing at the ripe old age of 19, as an assistant in the science fiction and fantasy department at Berkley Books, and survived at least three corporate mergers before moving to Tor, where she began by editing horror and a series of nonfiction books on parenting—topics which any parent will tell you dovetail nicely. In the years since, Melissa has edited just about every category of genre fiction there is, from sf/f to westerns, from woman-and-child-in-jeopardy to disaster thrillers, from historical novels to police procedurals. She edits Tor’s monthly email newsletter, supervises the graphic fiction publishing program, occasionally acquires fiction for tor.com, and goes to far too many meetings. Melissa is a 3rd-generation native of New York City, where she is currently raising a teenage daughter. In her wild youth she studied stage combat and could periodically be seen slinging steel in Central Park, often while very oddly dressed.

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I am a lucky, lucky woman.  I grew up with parents who not only understood genre fiction; they were fans.  In my household, Star Trek was fodder for dinnertime conversation (which series? which captain? would you rather be in engineering, science, or command?); as a teenager, when I finished my weekly stack of comic books, I’d pass them to my dad; my mother still reads sf. 

So I grew up surrounded by titans of category fiction (all kinds of categories, not just sf/f).  When I was 19, I started working in publishing, first in sf/f, later in horror, and even in comics, a tiny bit.  Now I edit pretty much any category that appeals to me.  I was in my early 20s when I started meeting some of the writers who had shaped my literary life.  I am eternally grateful for their courtesy and tolerance for what I am sure was a fair amount of fangirl squee. 

Cool as meeting some of my idols was, actually working with them was utterly terrifying.  I mean, how dare I tamper with their words?  What would convince them to take editorial advice from me, snot-nosed child that I was? 

At some convention in the mid-to-late 1980s I walked up to my boss, Tom Doherty, who was chatting with an older man, and Tom introduced me to:

ROBERT BLOCH

ROBERT BLOCH!

ROBERT BLOCH!!  

I almost fell on the floor.  The man was a god.

He was also one of the nicest human beings in the entire world.  (This is true of many horror writers, btw.  Nice, nice people.  All the nasty goes into the writing, I guess.)  He and his wife invited me to their home (!!!) and introduced me to their cats, who were sweethearts too.  Bob and Ellie Bloch were completely, devotedly in love with each other; it was wonderful to see. 

And then we worked together.

I. Edited. Robert. Bloch.

I cannot tell you how terrified I was to send off my first editorial letter to Bob. I just kept thinking, Are you people all insane?  Why are you trusting me with this?

Bob was a gentleman, so even if I had sent him a letter full of twaddle, he would have found a polite way to express his displeasure. Bob had been a working writer for decades longer than I’d been alive.  I think I entertained him with my youthful enthusiasm, and once I stopped treading on eggshells around him, we developed a good relationship.

Bob really enjoyed his work.  Once we had lunch at  convention (probably the first World Horror Convention) and talked shop through most of it, working out plot details for the book he was writing and hashing over the Crippen case, which we were both fascinated with.  We were deep in discussion of various methods of disposing of bodies (quicklime, dismemberment, etc.) when the restaurant’s manager came over. 

Apparently we had terrified our waitress to the point where she refused to serve us!

We gaped at the poor man before bursting out laughing.  I reassured the manager that no actual crimes were being plotted, only fictional ones.  I gave him my business card and introduced Robert, author of Psycho, Bloch.  The manager went off to calm the waitress, who eventually returned, bringing tea and the check.  I tipped her a little extra in an attempt to compensate for the scare we’d given her. 

Bob was not-so-secretly delighted that he’d frightened the woman.  As he often said, he had “the heart of a small boy.”  (“I keep it in a jar on my desk.”)

Scaring people was what he did.  On the page, on the screen, and in real life.  I’m so happy I got to witness some of it.

I’ve been lucky to work with many authors whose writings I’ve enjoyed, but there are only two others for whom I felt similar youthful passions.  One is Kit Reed.  The first thing of hers I remember reading is the short story “Automatic Tiger,” which was published in 1964 but which I suspect I read sometime around 1971, when I had begun devouring my dad’s sf library.  Reed’s feminist and subversive sf changed the way I looked at the world.  I edited three novels of hers, and one of them, Thinner Than Thou, is a powerful and important work that I will always be proud of being associated with.

The other is Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, whose Hotel Transylvania was published in 1978.  I read it that year, shortly before I started working in publishing.  I was 18, just a few years older than the novel’s heroine, and Hotel Transylvania was the major romantic vampire story of my youth.  Quinn and I have now done ten books together and I cannot begin to tell you how much I’ve learned from her.  On every book, I try to think, what will make people feel about this novel what I felt when I first read Hotel Transylvania? 

Editors want to kindle passion in people.  When we get to do that with writers who inspire passion in us, it’s a huge bonus and one that we treasure.