The 2005 Main Street Rag Short Fiction Anthology
Everything But the BabyFeaturing the Winners and Finalists in 2004 MSR Short Fiction Contest
ISBN 1-930907-92-3
Short Fiction, 224 pages, $10Scheduled release date: November 15, 2005
SPECIAL: Advance Order price ($8) good until November 1 and only if ordered from the New Releases page)
Introduction
Welcome readers. This is Main Street Rag's second annual short fiction anthology. Some of our regular readers might say that it has been more than a year since we published our first short fiction anthology, One Paycheck Away, and they would be correct. Main Street Rag Publishing Company is best known for publishing poetry and One Paycheck Away was our first short fiction-only publication. It was compiled in 2002 and published in 2003. Fiction Editor, Bill Wesse selected the stories for that book through a general submission process.
We were very pleased with that production and knew we wanted to expand to publish more short fiction, but we wanted to set up a reward system similar to what we have for our poetry chapbook and full-length poetry books: through contests that offered prize money and publication. Although we discovered some good stories to publish the first year we ran our short fiction contest in 2003, there were not enough to fill a book.
The 2005 Main Street Rag Short Fiction Anthology: Everything But the Baby is a collection of short stories that includes the winners, runners up and finalists from the 2004 MSR Short Fiction Contest. Winner Steve Taylor and runner up Norman Waksler, were also offered publication and their new books (Cut Men and The Book of Regrets, respectively) were also selected and published as a result of having entered that contest. Proof, I think, that contests can be used to do more than simply generate funds for a small press publisher.
I'd like to congratulate the winners and thank all of the participants who made this book possible. I hope they are pleased with the results.
At some point readers will likely have to wonder about the title of this book. That is the primary purpose for writing this introduction, by the way: to enlighten readers to the thought processes that go into such things.
One Paycheck Away was easy. We solicited for stories with a theme in mind. When we converted our selection process to contest, we thought it might be too limiting to force a theme on writers who were already paying a reading fee to enter the contest. And since we had a shortage of entries the year before, we didn't want a theme to prevent us from getting as many entries as possible.
When the judging was done, we noticed that there really wasn't much connection among the stories we had chosen to publish in the anthology, but there was a collective theme among the overall entries. Not having participated in the reading process, it was my job to referee the final judging session. As referee, I had a clipboard with a list of all the titles of every story entered into the contest. Before we met, I noticed that perhaps a dozen-almost 20% of the entries-had the word "Baby" as part of their title. After making our selection, we discovered that only one of the "Baby" stories had made it into the collection.
That is how the title, Everything But the Baby, came to be. We have a quirky sense of humor around here and hope that the folks who wrote all the "baby" stories will appreciate the irony and laugh with us.
At any rate, we've learned our lesson in regard to themes. All future Main Street Rag short fiction contests will have a theme.
As for the one story that did make it into this collection, "Baby Boy" by Kevin Winchester, when told that his was the "sole survivor" he offered to change the title. I considered it for a minute-consistency being one of my primary goals-but it might expose a perceived prejudice on our part, and we certainly wouldn't want that.
So there you have it: the thought process that went into choosing a title for this book. As you can see, it's not perfect, but I don't actually believe in perfection. I guess that's why it works for me. I hope it works for you as well and that you enjoy these stories that we are pleased to present to you.M. Scott Douglass
Publisher/Editor
Main Street Rag