How many editors have you had?

That’s a question to which the almost any short answer would be misleading.  In the strictest sense, I have no idea how many editors I’ve had, for several reasons.  First, I have no way to determine how many editors looked at my early stories that were published by various magazines, only that they had to number more than four.  Second, while all but one of my novels have been edited by David Hartwell,virtually all of them were also edited by whoever his assistant editor was at the time.  The only book for which David was not the head editor was edited by John Douglas, who had been David’s assistant editor at Timescape and who bought my second novel for Avon at a time when David was between editing positions. Since David has been my editor for over thirty years I can’t even remember, let alone count all of the editors who have worked with him and me… except I can say that the vast majority turned out to be good editors in their own right [while I may not recall all the faces or names, any writer recalls a bad editor or copy-editor, and I don’t recall any bad editors, but I still recall the one terrible copy-editor].