The Big Idea: Rosiee Thor and Vania Stoyanova

Friendship is magic! This, on several levels, is the lesson for this Big Idea for Why On Earth, an anthology of unusual alien invasion stories. Rosiee Thor and Vania Stoyanova, the editors, are laying out what it all means, start with their own first encounter.

ROSIEE THOR and VANIA STOYANOVA:

People say writing is a solitary art, but some of the best art is made with friends. That was the inspiration behind Why on Earth, our sci-fi anthology of interconnected stories. When we first conceived of this idea, we barely knew each other at all. A mutual friend played matchmaker to bring us together over our shared love of sci-fi and humor, and we quickly understood that we were going to have a lot of fun working together. We knew we wanted the anthology be funny, inclusive, and earnest as we explored the misadventures of a crew of teenage aliens crash landing during a rescue-mission gone wrong, but what we found was the true center of this anthology was the concept of connection–between aliens and humans, between the interconnected stories themselves, and between all of the authors writing for the anthology.

Setting out to create an interconnected anthology was no small feat. It involved a great deal of trust between us as the editors, our publishing team at Page Street, and the contributors to the anthology. Rather than each author being responsible solely for their own story, we all had to work together and believe in a shared vision. This involved creating shared world-building that would serve every story and characterizations for the aliens that would pop up in multiple stories. For example, CHIP, the ship’s AI, had to be consistent across more than half of the anthology’s eleven stories, which was quite the editorial challenge! For a group of authors–many of whom had never worked together before–this was something of an experiment. Frankly, we didn’t know if it would work, and it was a real leap of faith on the parts of our publisher and our contributors to agree to try…