Black Horticulture Up at Abyss and Apex

Didn't these blog posts used to have imaginative and silly titles?  Oh well.  I suddenly seem to have a lot of stories coming out in a relatively small space of time, (okay, three in as many weeks, if things hold to schedule), and I'm a bear of relatively little brain at the best of times, so let's go with stating simple facts this time around: my story Black Horticulture is now available at top genre webzine Abyss and Apex.

Reading through it again for the final edit, it occurred to me that Black Horticulture was my one great stab at twee fantasy.  Now, I don't mean that in any way as self-criticism; some brilliant work has been done in the field of what I think of as twee fantasy.  I would, for example, lump Poul Anderson's Three Hearts and Three Lions in there, and that's a completely wonderful novel.  Sometimes tweeness doesn't equal badness.  Sometimes it means charming and perhaps a little innocent and unapologetically fun and exciting.  Those are definitely the qualities I was aiming at with Black Horticulture.

Well, those and lots of crazy, garden-related violence.  Because after all, even Three Hearts had a guy lusting after a were-swan.

Black Horticulture is free to read right now.  But there will come a time, not so distantly in the future, when it will only be available to subscribers.  So if you'd like to read it, you should probably get onto it now, or else subscribe to Abyss and Apex. Or, you know, both.

Black is the New Black

I mentioned last week that my key to successfully getting short stories accepted at the moment seems to be just to send out the same story, Caretaker in the Garden of Dreams, out over and over again, since it got picked up by two different markets within a week of each other.

Recent events have made me reconsider this rule slightly.  From now on, I'll only be sending out either Caretaker or tales that have the word "black" in the title.  Reason being, having recently had Black Sun accepted by Digital Science Fiction, I've now sold Black Horticulture to long-standing, consistently great webzine Abyss and Apex.

According to my dubious records, Abyss and Apex was the thirteenth market I ever sent to, way back in early 2006.  Since then, I've been hammering them with submissions on a regular basis, at a rate of roughly three a year.  So all told, it only took me sixteen attempts to find one they really liked!  Sometimes determination really does pay off.  Then again, sometimes they call it "stalking" and throw you in jail for it; I guess telling one situation from the other is just one of those life lessons we all have to learn sooner or later.

Anyway, Black Horticulture's kind of a special story, and I'm really glad it was the one A & A finally caved on.  In 2007 or 2008, I wrote a small handful of tales where, for the first time, I really felt like I'd nailed something, even if I wasn't completely sure what it was or what to do with it.  Black Horticulture was one of those.  If I remember rightly, the others were  Rindelstein's Monsters, which ended up in Comet Press's The Death Panel anthology, In the Service of the Guns, which landed in Space and Time, and Dancing in the Winter Rooms, coming up in Electric Velocipede.  So they've all done good, and Black Horticulture is no exception.  If it's taken a bit longer than the others, it's because - in another one of those crucial life lesson things - I discovered that sometimes you don't have to start with five pages of back story covering your hero's entire life from birth, you can just tuck that information away in a couple of lines in dialogue.  Eureka!


Right.  I'd better get back to work on my new story.  It's called Black Caretaker in the Black Garden of Black Dreams - the uplifting tale of one 1940s African-American groundskeeper's struggle to defend the baseball stadium where he works as a nightwatchman from interdimensional aliens.  Seriously, this one's gonna make me rich...