Somebody told us a neat story about Laura Anne Gilman (foreground) and her latest novel, Flesh and Fire, which is that her editor at Pocket Books, Jennifer Heddle, used to be her assistant back when they were both at Roc, the Penguin Group fantasy imprint. Gilman confirmed the tale when I met the pair a while back. “I needed somebody who could hit the ground running,” she recalled, and an agent recommended Heddle, who was her assistant at the time; the “interview” took place in a hotel hallway outside a party at the Readercon convention. “Basically, I hired her and threw her to the wolves,” GIlman laughed.
“Laura always treated me as a partner,” Heddle says of their time together, and when Gilman left in 2004 to work on her writing full-time, it seemed like Heddle would step into her position, but Heddle had already been looking for a new professional base by then. “It looked as if I left because Laura left,” she reflected, “but the timing just worked out that way.” Pocket was looking to increase the size of its fantasy footprint, and Heddle came on board.
There was another house that was interested in Flesh and Fire, the first volume in a new fantasy series, but Gilman couldn’t resist the opportunity to work with Heddle again—although Heddle did feel a bit odd when she sent her former boss a revision letter after reading the manuscript… a letter that reflected everything she’d learned from Gilman as an editor. “What happened was she kicked my ass,” Gilman laughed, “and she was right. She came right out and said, this works, this sucks… As a writer, you have to trust the editor to make the right suggestions, and that she doesn’t have her own agenda for the work. The tone was set in the subject header of an email Gilman sent Heddle soon after: “The apprentice has become the master.”