Who the editors are
I should start by noting that it seems like almost everything I write lately seems to come out sounding either lecturey or combative; I'm not sure why. So I'll explicitly note that the following is meant in the spirit of friendly reminder.
This has come up a couple times lately in various places, so I thought it was worth commenting on directly, even if (at the moment) only to those of you who read my journal. But I hope you'll pass the word along.
Strange Horizons has three fiction editors: Susan Marie Groppi, Karen Meisner, and me. Incoming submissions are distributed more or less randomly among the three of us. (If you're not sure how the process works, see our process page.) So even if you've worked with one of us in the past, it's a good idea to address submissions to all three of us, and to remember that there are three of us when you talk about us in public forums.
I know it can be easy to forget. I tend to keep a higher profile in various sf-related online forums these days than Susan and Karen do, and I tend to handle all official email correspondence with authors other than rejections and revision requests, and in the past I've done almost all of the line-editing. And I've got that spiffy "Senior Fiction Editor" title. So it's an understandable mistake if you address submissions to me, or refer to me as "the fiction editor" for SH, or if you talk about selling stories to me, or otherwise leave out Susan and/or Karen in talking about the magazine.
But I think it's important to remember that even if you see my (or Susan's) name more often, we all three have an equal say in what stories we publish. That "Senior" in my title basically means that I do more of the administrative stuff and I write up the departmental status reports; it doesn't mean that my opinions carry more weight than those of my co-editors. (Similarly, Susan runs the magazine and makes the big decisions for the whole magazine, but her editor-in-chief status doesn't mean she has more say in choosing fiction than Karen and I do.) I send out the acceptance letters, but it's the department as a whole that buys the stories, and we only buy a story when we all three agree to do so.
It's also important to remember that the magazine has a lot of staff members who do other important work, not related to the fiction department. The departments are very autonomous; content choices made in one department have little to do with the choices made in other departments. Because I'm immersed in the fiction department, I occasionally slip and talk about the fiction department as if it's the magazine, but that's a mistake on my part. I'm trying to train myself to explicitly refer to the fiction department when that's what I mean.
Anyway. Point being, when you're talking to or about the fiction department, please try to remember to use language that includes all three of us.