On his excellent More Red Ink blog, editor Marty Halpern reveals the events and the process behind Alastair Reynolds’ forthcoming SLOW BULLETS.

So when I contacted Alastair Reynolds last year about submitting a novella for Tachyon Publications, he responded with – much to my delight: “I am working on a novella right now which does not yet have a home.” It doesn’t get any better than that because I obviously had the perfect home for that novella. That novella is entitled SLOW BULLETS and will be published in June.

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But back to SLOW BULLETS: The first draft of the manuscript that Al sent me clocked in at around 40,125 words. To meet novella requirements, the story had to have a maximum word count of 40,000 words, so I asked Al to review the manuscript and cut a minimum of 250-300 words, to ensure the story was safely below the 40K word cap. Having worked with Al previously, I knew that he would accomplish this self-editing with the skill of a surgeon – make that a brain surgeon. When I read the second draft of SLOW BULLETS, the story flowed so flawlessly that I couldn’t tell where words had been cut or changed; I would have had to use the “compare two versions of a document” option in MS Word to determine the specific edits. I also suggested a couple tweaks to the content itself for clarity.

Read the rest of Halpern’s interesting article at More Red Ink.

For more about SLOW BULLETS, visit the Tachyon page.

Cover art by Thomas Canty.

Design by Elizabeth Story.