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In this issue’s column we feature Donna Scott. Donna is a freelance editor working with many of the big publishing houses, a writer, a very busy stand-up comedian, a poet (and former Bard of Northampton), a director and former chair of the BSFA. And now has launched her own publishing imprint, supported by none other than Alan Moore, with whom she has worked for several years. All this while holding down a fulltime job...
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SOMETIMES, I WAKE UP and remember that I’m a publisher and I just grin.
Some might say that starting a new publishing business now is probably the result of a midlife crisis, but I can assure you it isn’t. It is entirely coincidental that a certain milestone birthday was looming as I was putting my first book together. That said, making the decision to ‘go for it’ does feel like a gift I have wrapped up in a bow to give to myself for my big Hawaii five-oh birthday. What better present for a book lover than a bookish life? An even more bookish life that is, seeing as I was already an established freelance editor, and a writer of short fiction before this significant juncture in my maturity.
What better present? Perhaps more shelves, seeing as my office is now crammed with boxes. I’m sure other small publishers will recognise this state of affairs...
Anyway, my new publishing business is called The Slab Press, and our first book is Dark Horses: A Science-Fiction Anthology by Friends of the Arts Lab.
I would never have been able to embark upon this exhilarating phase of my life without the influence and encouragement of friends from the world of genre publishing. The editor of this magazine, Ian Whates, is one such person! He has trusted me with sourcing stories for the Best of British Science Fiction anthology series for Newcon Press for the past eight years, and I’m so proud to have been given this prestigious responsibility. I’m particularly pleased that it always gets great reviews, too.
I also need to include the lady who introduced us: Storm Constantine, my much-missed friend. I cut my teeth as an editor with Storm’s Immanion Press, and with the magazine she originally founded Visionary Tongue, which I co-edited along with Jamie Spracklen.
I feel blessed to have met these three, some twenty years ago now, and these friends (along with others since) have given me a lot of insight into what a book-centred life could be like, if I would just try a little...
This is a joke of course. I’m a resolute workhorse, who is constantly piling my paniers with ever more weighty and challenging items.
After editing for Immanion Press, I set my sights on establishing myself as a freelance editor, and I got work from the likes of Gollancz, Angry Robot, Solaris, and Games Workshop Black Library among others. I always saw editing as part and parcel of my creative life, which I pursued with earnest after moving to Northampton in 2008 to live with my now husband, Neil K. Bond. I also began trying my hand at stand-up comedy, performance poetry, podcasting, and carried on with the writing of course, as well as becoming first Awards Administrator, then Chair of the British Science-Fiction Association until 2018 (I’ve remained a Director of the BSFA since that time). All this on top of the ‘day job’ as a trainer. Whilst I have earned plaudits in comedy and poetry, as well as a solid reputation as an editor, I’m aware that some people do view my multi-disciplinary plate-spinning with a kind of abject horror.
To be honest, I could always use more sleep! I’ve been trying to catch-up for not doing a heck of a lot that was useful or creative in the wakeful hours of my twenties, and I’ve spent the last few years trying to cram in more projects in a rebellious stance against time itself. However, time is winning. I feel that my life has been heading down a particular pathway, and there is one thing towards which I really should devote my energy and imagination now.
This is how I got here: I’d been living in Northampton for about a decade when Alan Moore asked if I would edit his epic novel Jerusalem, and I agreed. It’s a ghostly pilgrimage around the streets of Alan’s hometown and back through his family tree, though Alan himself features in the book as a female artist called Alma. If you haven’t read it, you really should. Be prepared, it’s longer than the Old Testament, but I’m thrilled to have been asked to work on it, because it really is a masterpiece.
Not long after I’d finished working on the book, I saw that Alan was organising an event called Under the Austerity at Northampton University. This was a discussion on counterculture and featured talks from Alan Moore, John Higgs, Robin Ince, Scroobius Pip, Francesca Martinez, and Josie Long, and included music by Grace Petrie.
During the event the subject of Arts Labs came up, which had been a phenomenon in the Sixties in Northampton, and someone suggested we start one up again. My husband Neil and I signed up after the talks had finished to hear more. We started going to meetings, initially at NN Cafe, then The Lab. We didn’t realise it then, but Arts Lab was to play a huge part in our lives. Over the years, we have produced artwork, plays, magazines, and events, and even arranged trips to other Arts Lab events around the country. One such event was the now legendary Artsmageddon show, about what might happen in a cultural apocalypse, in which we were all in thrall to a tyrannical Mandrill (played by Alan). Later, we joked that we had accidentally precipitated an actual cultural apocalypse by holding it the night before the referendum on leaving the EU.
It was Alan who suggested that the Arts Lab should produce an anthology of science fiction, and that I should edit it. I reached out to the Northampton Arts Lab community, and others from around the UK, and I started acquiring stories and artwork.
I took inspiration from the project and as I worked on this initial book, I began to incubate an idea about how I could one day run a publishing company of my own. The Arts Lab book—Dark Horses: A Science Fiction Anthology – would be the first. The name of The Slab Press takes a little Arts Lab inspiration, and a little from Mary Shelley, whose novel Frankenstein was arguably the first science-fiction novel, and which spawned an expanded universe of popular culture references, of which a ‘slab’ is just one recognisable trope.
So, here it is. My publishing company, with its first book. Alan Moore is the most well-known of the contributors with his short story, “Location, Location, Location”, The book also includes experimental flash fiction from the writer Alistair Fruish, who also wrote The Sentence, a 46,000-word single-sentence work that is entirely monosyllabic, inspired by his career as a writer-in-residence for prisons, and work by the poet Sophie Sparham, as well as pieces of new writing by Arts Lab members from Northampton and across the UK. There are stories about post-apocalyptic house choices, vengeful robots, sentient waste-fed microscopic creatures taking over, murderous social media, dissolved languages, time-looping assassins, and much more.
I hope The Slab Press will prove an apt name, because I want it to create a life. A bookish life.