2021: I Tried to Get Out and They Held the Door

It's not as though, when I admitted around this time last year that I had no choice left except to give up on my lifelong dream of being a professional writer, I expected anyone to step in and magically fix things.  Still, there's not being disappointed and there's being fine with a situation, and I can't say I'm altogether fine with the fact that a handful of people who might, with negligible cost to themselves, have made an enormous difference, chose instead to let a year go by without lifting a finger.  The most obvious of those, of course, being my former publisher, whose inaction and disinterest have kept the fully completed fourth Black River Chronicles novel from getting out into the world, not to mention burying my also-ready-to-be-published novella Graveyard of Titans and leaving my Tales of Damasco trilogy in limbo.  Which is to say that, yes, The Black River Chronicles: Graduate or Die is no closer to ever seeing the light of day.  Not that I've altogether given up, but - especially given that my request for support from the SFWA went ignored for over ten months, and yes, I'm including them in the abovementioned 'small handful' - it's hard to see any reason to be hopeful.

Mind you, there's an argument that my biggest enemy on the writing front in 2021 was myself, since I was the one who thought it was a good idea to try and finish the book I'd begun, The Beasts of Siege City, though the project had already become an act of masochism and clearly wasn't going to get any easier.  Somehow I did indeed make it to the end, and insanely, what I was left with was some 350'000 words of novel, which is, I think, more than all three Tales of Damasco books together.  That one is even less likely to be read by anyone, since it's broken as hell, to the point where I don't know how I'd even begin to go about editing it into shape.  And if I was still writing, I think I'd be quite frustrated by that, since I know there's good stuff in there and that it might have been really good stuff if I'd come at the material when I was in a better state.

Then there's the really weird thing, which is that, for all that it was most definitely the death knell of my decade-long career as a novelist, 2021 somehow turned out to be a bloody good year for short fiction sales - arguably the best I've ever had, depending on how you juggle the numbers.  Is there some moral here?  I'd like to think it's that the short fiction side of things might be worth persevering with, except that short fiction is a bitterly awful way to make money and the prospect of going back to writing as effectively a second job isn't something I can contemplate right at the minute.  (Not that I exactly have a first job right at the minute; boy was 2021 awful in just about every conceivable way!)  Still, if all that can be said is that this short spurt of sales was a last huzzah then, whatever, I'll take that, especially since it meant getting to return to some of my favourite markets and to work once more with some of my favourite editors.

Even nicer, two of those stories would probably have been sunk if they hadn't made it into the venues I'd effectively written them for.  Where else but Mysterion would have considered the lengthy magic-realist meditation on religion and isolation that was An Exchange of Values Conducted in Good Faith?  Where else would my experimental fantasy action story Fall to Rise have fit but in Beneath Ceaseless Skies?  And while it's possible to imagine the strange little horror fable A Cold Yesterday in Late July elsewhere, there was no more perfect home for it than The Dark.  Add getting a story I'd come to suspect was unsaleable, my warped spy pastiche M.A.T.E.R Knows Best, into Distant Shore Publishing and a late-in-the-day acceptance from On Spec for my Compassion Fatigue - a personal-favourite piece that I spent years trying to shift finding a place in a 'zine I've been trying to break into for roughly as long - and then top it all off with a couple of anthology reprints and, on that single narrow front, 2021 was a total win.

And of course there's one other bit of good news, in that my delayed Rebellion novella The Outfit is out at the beginning of March, which I realise only now is all of about a month away.  So that's exciting, and something I imagine I'll be talking about quite a bit in the coming weeks, so I won't say much here besides - Joseph Stalin!  Pulling one of the biggest bank robberies in history!  To fund the Russian Revolution!  And it all really actually happened!!! 

Short Story News - May 2021

Apparently, it's been almost a year since I last did a short fiction round-up, which I guess isn't that surprising since I haven't had a lot to tell, but there have been a few snippets of good news along the way, and I reckon they've piled up enough by now that they warrant a quick post, especially since I've had three stories out in recent months that I didn't do I great deal to draw anyone's attention to.

The first of those saw my return to excellent horror 'zine The Dark, with a story by the title of A Cold Yesterday in Late July.  Like seemingly most of the horror I've been writing in recent years, this is another introspective one, and seems all the more so in the light of the last year.  A Cold Yesterday is about isolation, about falling between the cracks, about depression somewhat, about the inescapability of the past, and about the slivers that aging cuts from us - but actually, given that that stuff is all pretty universal, what makes it feel so personal is that it's about hiking and I drew a lot of the vibe from my own adventures ambling around the countryside.  Funnily enough for something so bleak, I had quite a bit of fun writing it, mainly because it's amusing to make up names for out-of-the-way villages and the sort of odd rural landmarks you only tend to stumble across when you get far off the beaten track.  Even more strange, it's been well-received from what I've seen, with a particularly nice and detailed review here.  Oh, and if you should want to read (or listen to) the story itself, here's a link for that.

A much more cheerful tale all round is Love in the Age Of..., which appeared in The Fox Spirit Book of Love, out last month.  I'm yet to see a contributor copy, so I can't comment on the collection as a whole, but if my story's at all representative, it's going to be a weird old beast.  Love in the Age Of... was a heck of a tough sell that probably would never have got picked up for any book but this, in that it pulls the sort of stunt that makes it all but impossible to win over slush readers, who, let's face it, can't always be relied on to get past the first page.  And that makes things tricky if your first page is unicorn porn.  Look, you'll be glad to hear that I didn't actually go sending out unicorn porn (unless you're anything like the friend who felt the need to point out how disappointed she was with me for making promises I didn't keep) but I can see how a feint in that direction might have put some folks off.  Not Chloë Yates, though, and much credit to her for that!  Indeed, this ended up as one of those rare cases of landing a story with an editor who seemed to properly get it, and the edits were an unusually pleasant process.

Next, and also a very strange tale, because I guess that's what I write these days, we have M.A.T.E.R Knows Best, which - well, I'm not going to try and convince you it's not a James Bond pastiche, because it certainly is, but that's not really what it's about.  What it's about is my finding James Bond films for the most part pretty screwed up in a lot of ways, but especially Skyfall, a film so staggeringly misogynistic that I'm at a loss as to how some people missed it (or, bewilderingly, ignored all the evidence to the contrary and declared the film to be a step in the right direction ... you do you, The Guardian!)  I only came across this essay today, having realised I was too lazy to try and make its arguments myself, but I agree with pretty much every word and it's a great summing up of what I was trying to get at with M.A.T.E.R Knows Best.  But that all sounds kind of heavy, so I probably ought to mention that it's actually quite a fun, blackly comic story, except maybe for when it gets a bit more serious at the end.  Anyway, it was another piece I'd given up much hope of selling due to its extreme nicheness, so hats off to Distant Shore Publishing for seeing that as a virtue instead of a flaw.  Plus, it's another one you can read for the princely sum of bugger all, at the link here.

And while that's everything I've had out lately, I've made another couple of sales that are well worth a mention.  On the surface, Fall to Rise is a relatively straightforward, action-heavy story of the sort I don't generally write, but from my perspective it was actually an experiment in crafting a narrative bound almost entirely to a single location and with some very weird physical rules.  Like everything here, it's eccentric enough that it didn't expect it to be an easy sell, so I was extra-happy when it went to my 'zine of choice, Beneath Ceaseless Skies.  And that was doubly true for An Exchange of Values, Conducted in Good Faith, a story I wrote specifically with a market in mind, something so risky that I wouldn't normally take the chance.  Then it ended up being far longer than intended, drifting into novelette territory, and I really thought I'd shot myself in the foot - except that said market happened to up their word limit enough that it slipped through and, thank goodness, they liked it enough to say yes.  Since the ink's not yet dry on that one, I'd better not say who it was yet, so I'll settle for noting that with the year not yet half done, it's already proving to be one of the best I've had for short story sales, which is awfully appreciated given what a train wreck 2020 was on that (and every other!) front.

Short Story News, March 2016

It's been a while since I recapped any news on the short story front, perhaps because I've been distracted by having an entire collection of the things out.  But while the release of The Sign in the Moonlight and Other Stories at the end of the last month - available from Amazon UK and Amazon US, amongst other places! - has certainly been the biggest thing happening, it's been by no means the only one.

There is, for example, the publication - as cover story, no less! - of my first and so far only stab at crime short fiction, Step Light, in the prestigious Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine.  I remain completely gobsmacked that this ever happened, it seemed like a huge risk dipping my toes into a genre I had no experience of and it's hard to imagine how it could possibly have worked out any better.

(Though, if you should ever want to suck all the fun out of having a story published in a well-respected magazine for someone, do what some complete stranger did to me and message them to point out that it was full of mistakes.  For maximum fun-sucking, make sure to be as blunt as possible, and to not tell them what those mistakes actually were.)

Meanwhile, at the end of last year, A Killer of Dead Men marked my second appearance in the ever-wonderful Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and my second tale following the adventures of master-assassin Otranto Onsario: you can read it here or listen to it here, but I'd strongly recommend opting for the latter because it's a great rendition.  Still on the dark fantasy front, one of my personal favourites stories, The Magpie of Souls, got picked up by new market Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores.  This is the tale of two archetypes, the evil sorcerer and the heroic warrior, coming face to face with each other and their own natures and discovering that perhaps they've turned out to be very different people to what they once intended.  It should be out by the time you read this, and though you'll need to subscribe, doing so will only set you back a modest $12 for this first year.  Meanwhile, another recently appeared market, Liminal Stories, picked up my incredibly odd science fiction story Team Invasion - seriously, this is the oddest thing I've written in years - and Golgotha, an historical horror story of sorts, is set to appear in the upcoming Mysterion anthology.

The bulk of my recent sales and publications, though, belong to Digital Fiction Publishing and its growing number of imprints.  In fact, given that Digital is also the home of The Sign in the Moonlight and Other Stories, it's fair to say that they've now published far more of my short fiction than any other market, and there's more on the way.  Late last year, my The Painted City came out as a solo e-book, and has since been collected as part of the delightfully-named Infinity Cluster anthology - one that for once I've read in a timely fashion, and wouldn't hesitate to recommend.  In the meantime, I've sold a couple more reprint stories to Digital Science Fiction, Dancing in the Winter Rooms and Passive Resistance, while the Digital Fantasy Fiction imprint has picked up my Black Horticulture.

I remember saying the last time I discussed short fiction, back in October of last year, that the strong spell of sales and publications I was having couldn't possibly last; looking back now, I can only feel immensely grateful that it's gone on for at least a little longer.  I can't remember a time when so much work I was really proud of was being picked up and published at such a rate.  Sooner or later it's bound to dry up - who knows, perhaps it already has? - but in the meantime it's been a lot of fun. 

2015: Lukewarm Catastrophe, Moderate Triumph

Well, I've left this rather late, haven't I?  But part of the reason for that, I think, is that I hate being vague and there's a disproportionate amount of news this year that I can't, for one reason and another, share here.

So, for example, all I can say about the beginning of the year is that something very bad indeed happened, something that threw all of my plans into chaos and had (has) the potential to end my writing career for good.  Many of those reading this, I imagine, will already know what I'm talking about, but my instinct is to not discuss a problem of such magnitude until I've managed to solve it once and for all - as, frustratingly, I still haven't almost a year later.

It seems like the rest of 2015 has been a struggle to crawl out from the shadow of that one event - if only due to the vast amount of extra work it's generated.  Nor did it help that the two projects I'd hoped to have out this year, my debut collection The Sign in the Moonlight and Other Stories and C21st Gods, both ran into problems outside of my control that left them drastically delayed.   Things even dried up on the short fiction sales front for a long spell in the first half of the year, and by the summer the situation was looking bleak indeed.

Which is about all of the bad news, because since then things have picked up dramatically.  Certainly those short story sales finally materialized, and in a veritable flood; 2015 turned out to be my most profitable year for short fiction yet, and by quite a margin.  There were return sales to Nightmare and Beneath Ceaseless Skies (A Killer of Dead Men, out now!), a couple of Digital Science Fiction anthologies, and that gorgeous collection from Flame Tree Publishing, amongst numerous other highlights.

As for work done, I'm about on schedule, and although it doesn't feel like it somehow, I've definitely produced more than in 2014 by quite some margin.  My medieval detective fantasy White Thorne is finished in first draft, and post-apocalyptic superhero noir The Uplifted is a couple of weeks off being at the same stage.  Between those two I managed to wedge in another sci-fi novella, Graveyard of Titans, and a handful of short stories, to a total count of somewhere around 300'000 words.  I also did considerably more editing, with the final draft of To End All Wars completed way back in January, and Degenerates and my first attempt at a crime novel The Bad Neighbour both going through their second and third drafts.

Now here we are and it's a whole new year.  Looking back, I enjoyed 2015 rather a lot; it may have seen only mixed success on the writing front, but in general my life got substantively better, as I settled into my new existence back in the north of England and starting putting down some roots.  Which, ugh, sounds kind of weird now that I read over it ... but what I mean to say is, I made new friends and got back in touch with old ones, whilst also finally finishing off my house and finding time to expand my hobbies and social life a little.  None of which probably sounds like a big deal, but when you've spent more than half a decade of your life knowing you'd likely be moving to yet another part of the country within a few months, a little stability goes a long way.

And at least a few definitely positive things are going to happen in 2016.  I'm already thrilled for the release of my debut novella Patchwerk from Tor.com in a little under two weeks from now - especially since the early reception has been strong.  The Sign in the Moonlight and Other Stories should be out from Spectral at around the same time, and if it isn't then I have plans in place that will hopefully ensure that it still sees the light of day sooner rather than later.  C21st Gods has a new artist tenuously attached, and there's a good chance there'll be at least an issue or two of that out before year's end.  And then there's my biggest bit of news - and the other major thing I can't talk about.  I suppose I can safely so that I've sold a new novel on pitch, that I'm going to be writing it between now and May, and that there's a solid likelihood it will be out before the end of the year.  Needless to say, this is hugely exciting for any number of reasons, but the one that I keep coming back to is that it's relaxed some of the financial strain I'm under; I now have actual income, at least for a while, and that fact alone is enough to make 2016 a much more hopeful place than 2015 ever was.

Short Story News, September 2015

I've been remiss in keeping up with my short story-related news here of late, though in fairness that's been not entirely because I'm easily distracted and at least partly because not so long ago it looked as though a number of things would be coming out at more or less the same time; it seemed like sound logic to post all of that news together, but publication dates wandered as publication dates will and in the meantime other stuff has been happening and, boy, this is a lot of unnecessary preamble, isn't it?

Short Story News, September 2015.  Take two.

I have a story out as an e-book!  It seems decidedly weird that this should be the first time this has happened outside of novels, but there it is.  Digital Science Fiction was an immensely good professional-rate market that lasted not half long enough around four years ago, published my Black Sun in their excellent debut issue First Contact and were scheduled to publish my Across the Terminator when things went south.  So I was overjoyed when owner Michael Wills got in touch to say that Digital Science Fiction was getting reincarnated and would I still be up for him publishing it?  Across the Terminator - probably the nearest thing I've ever written to hard SF and perhaps the nearest thing to a proper love story - is part of a rapidly expanding e-book line-up that's well worth checking out, and you can find it at Amazon UK here or Amazon US here.

Elsewhere I've been making a dint on my finally almost-vanished backlog of somewhat older stories.  Which sounds a lot like "trunk stories" if you're the suspicious sort but they're honestly not that, and in fact quite the opposite; if I'm still sending out anything more than about five years old then I've had to be pretty damn certain of its merits, and it's probably been polished beyond an inch of its life.  Of no story is that more true than Children of Deadways, a profoundly strange slice of sci-fi gothic zombie horror that I feel like I've spent forever getting right and has finally found a place with one of my favourite print markets, Space and Time, who published my In the Service of the Guns way back in 2009.

Perhaps a little older even than Children of Deadways, if memory serves, is my contemporary ghost story Knock, Knock, which has been one of those tales that I never quite understood how it wasn't selling; a stupid question ultimately because the answer is always the same and always that the right home just hasn't come along.  Anyway, it's a creepy little thing based immensely loosely on events and places from my time in York, and that home turned out to be Pantheon Magazine, whose Gaia: Shadows and Breath 2 anthology I was being impressed by so recently.  It's lined up for their Hestia-themed issue, which is a perfect fit for at least a couple of reasons - neither of which I can touch on without spoiling a story that hasn't even had a chance to get published yet!

Fortunately it hasn't just been older work selling; possibly the best news I've had lately was in regards to A Killer of Dead Men, which I wrote specifically and rather optimistically for Beneath Ceaseless Skies as a follow-up to my Ill-Met at Midnight, published there back in August 2013, and which to my delighted surprise is actually going to appear in Beneath Ceaseless Skies.  This was a huge relief because it would have felt weird to have Otranto Onsario, master assassin beyond compare and possessor of perhaps the most twisted conscience in fantasy literature, appearing anywhere else.  I really like this character, it seems that BCS editor Scott Andrews does too, and I should probably start thinking about writing another Otranto story, shouldn't I?

I feel bad now for not having mentioned here the stuff that's come out recently or due imminently - like the Second Contacts anthology from Bundoran Press, or Purple Sun Press's Coven - but I'll get to those in the near future, I'm sure.  This post is already long enough and has achieved its main objective, which was to remind me that amidst the lousy news there's been plenty of good stuff happening.  Putting it all together like this, it's actually been a pretty great few months, and while it's probably far too much to ask, I'll be immensely pleased up things keep up like this for the remainder of the year.

Short Story News, May 2015

I've been a bit remiss in keeping up to date with short story news this last month or so, which is unfortunate because I've had an unusually large amount of stuff out.  But it's nice in a way, in that now I get to post about it all together and it looks like I have a ton of stories out in great venues every month!

Truth is, though, that even by the standards of the markets I've been lucky enough to sell to, this has been a really excellent selection.  Taking them in chronologically reverse order, it was a mere couple of days ago that my weird horror tale Caretaker in the Garden of Dreams appeared in The Drabblecast.  This is a story that's been around a bit, and this isn't even the first time it's been podcast - that honour goes to the now sadly defunct Shadowcast - and everywhere it's appeared it's been treated more than decently.  Caretaker was editor's choice in the issue of Necrotic Tissue it appeared in, made their all-time best of anthology, got a terrific - and terrifically grotesque - illustration from The Shadowcast and this time around receives an absolutely brilliant rendition, with not only an evocative reading from David Cummings of the No Sleep Podcast but some perfectly chosen sound effects.  All bias aside, this thing is weird and creepy and I urge you to give it a listen!

Then, a mere few days behind that, and wrapped within that glorious cover over there, we had Jonathan Green's anthology Sharkpunk, which has been a part of my life for so long now that I'm almost sad that it's out.  Still, it is, and it's brilliant, surely the definitive take on a beastie that was crying out for its own definitive anthology, and it's already garnering some gushing reviews.  There's this at The Eloquent Page, and particularly nice from my point of view, both The Ginger Nuts of Horror and Geek Planet Online pick out my The Shark in the Heart for special mention.

Next is a bit of cheat, in that I suspect it's been out for a while now, but due to the tectonic slowness of the US to UK postal service I only recently got my contributor copies.  Anyway, it's the anthology of Clarkesworld's seventh year, unexpectedly titled Clarkesworld Year Seven, it contains my Across the Terminator, and of course it's amazing because it's bloody Clarkesworld. 


Then, lastly and not at all leastly, in that I'm only talking about it so late because I somehow hadn't entirely realised it was out, there's Mark Teppo's XIII anthology from Resurrection House.  A curio this, in the best sense of the word, and perhaps more at the literary end of the genre spectrum than the kind of markets I tend to appear in, but in a world where there are people who still think editing yet another zombie anthology is an exciting prospect, it's so damn nice to see a theme anthology where the theme - transformation, rebirth and that titular number - is so unabashedly weird. XIII really is a treasure, and it received about the most thorough review I've ever seen at Tangent Online, which by the way has extremely nice things to say about my Twilight For the Nightingale.

Oh, and speaking of people saying nice things ... let's end by pointing out that David Steffen recently picked out my story Ill-Met at Midnight for his top fifteen Beneath Ceaseless Skies podcasts at SF Signal!  If you haven't listened to it yet then it's still available here.

On Writing for Prompts

Lately I've been thinking about - and discussing with writer friends - the merits of producing work for specific markets, or for markets with very particular guidelines.  By that I guess I'm mostly talking about anthologies of the "we only want to see historical stories about cybernetically enhanced chickens" ilk, though of course there are such things as work-for-hire and specialist publishers like Rebellion, whose recent opening for submissions was one of the events that got me mulling over this in the first place.

At any rate, it's something that in the past I've found myself arguing against pretty adamantly.  A lot of that, it occurs to me now, goes back to how my first attempt at writing to a prompt went very badly - or very well, depending on how broad your perspective is.  It was an anthology of fantasy stories about assassins, and I had a suitable idea ready to go, so I thought why not?  It wasn't great money but it was okay, and it was an open enough premise that I figured I could always sell the story elsewhere if it didn't get picked up.  But once I'd finished I felt good about the results, and hopeful that it might find a place.

It didn't, of course.  Instead I got a detailed personal rejection, based entirely on the first page.  This was exactly as galling as you'd think it would be, especially since every criticism the editor had made would have been addressed if he'd bothered to read on a couple more pages.  (It only occurs to me now to wonder if he lived all his life like this.  Dating must have been a nightmare, unless people were wearing really nice shoes.)  Anyway, as will often happen, it worked out okay in the end: I sold the story, which was Ill-Met at Midnight, for considerably more money to Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and felt briefly grateful to an editor who thought judging stories on a single page was a viable thing to do.

This experience, inevitably, coloured my perceptions.  So, a couple of years later, did writing a story at an editor's personal request and to an extraordinarily specific mandate, for no money, which they then rejected at the last moment for reasons nothing to do with the story itself.  The conclusion that both experiences led me to was this: I could write a story specifically for one market and have it rejected, or I could write a story that I wanted to write, that was appropriate for any number of different markets and, with perseverance and a little luck, sell it for as good or better money.  Except that it was even worse than that, because writing for a specific prompt - especially an obscure one - was practically doomed to failure.  Since well-paying anthologies tend to get flooded with submissions, my fantasy story about assassins had to stand against maybe hundreds of other fantasy story about assassins, and had proportionately less chance of standing out.  Writing to a prompt actually decreased my chances of selling a story, and so seemed to me pretty much the definition of a mug's game.

Anyway, as is often the way with these posts, I only mention any of this because I've sort-of changed my mind. To the point where a fair portion of last month and this one have been devoted to writing stories for specific anthologies.  Is this the complete reversal it looks like?  Um ... not exactly.  But I've got to admit, I've seen another side to the argument, and that is, writing to someone else's pitch can be fun.  It can also be inspiring, in a world where inspiration isn't always as close as you'd like it to be.  In three cases since January, a stranger's suggestion kicked my brain into churning out ideas that I found myself helplessly eager to get down on paper.  In one case that meant that something which had been rattling inside my brain for half a decade becoming suddenly clear and writable.  But for the other two it was just sheer, distilled inspiration, the seeds of new stories manifesting out of nothing - and, man, I've missed that.

So from now on, maybe I'll be a bit more open to writing for specific markets. Or maybe all three of those stories will get rejected and I'll go back to my old opinion.  And perhaps the point here is more that no matter your writing practices, no matter the kinds of markets you favour, it's good to open your inspiration-radar up wide.  I suspect that I'd forgotten a little just how much ideas can come from anywhere, but it's absolutely true, and it's no bad thing to let someone else's suggestions guide you every once in a while.

December, Where It's At...

The problem with planning is that plans sometimes need to change, and it's tough not to feel a little bad when that happens.  Especially if you're perhaps a bit too much of a planner, like I am; if you are, indeed, slightly OCD in setting yourself targets and sticking to them as if life, the universe and everything depended on it.

I mention this as a roundabout way of saying that until I few days ago I was planning to start my new novel today, and now I'm not.  And I feel a little bad about it. But I probably shouldn't, because not starting it is the right thing to do.  I should, in fact, be feeling pretty good about making the right decision.  So here's a blog post where I get to convince myself of that.

As I've hinted at more than once, but perhaps never explicitly said, I've burned myself out quite badly over the last couple of years; writing full time around full time work took a toll on my health, and by the time I walked away from the day job I was more than ready to drop.  I'm glad to say that things are now much better - as you'd hope they would be after six weeks of relative peace and quiet - but they're still not quite better enough that I feel ready to wade into the demands of a new novel.

And the new novel is going to be demanding.  That's the other thing I've realised over the last few weeks.  The First World War is not a subject you can approach lightly.  My preliminary research, of which I've done a fair bit, has only made me realise how much damn research I'm going to need to do to get anywhere near the level of understanding and technical accuracy I need to do this book justice.  Which turns out to be revelation / difficulty number two: I'm going to need to try and do it justice. There's nothing like reading the diaries of decent men who died horribly to sharpen the mind on that latter score; I really don't want to be the guy who writes a lousy, trivializing book about the First World War.

All of which means that December is now research month the second, and also rest month the second, because I want to be fighting fit when I go at this thing.  It's also the second month of my return to short story writing, which is yet another reason why putting the novel back a little feels like the right thing to do, because getting back into short story writing has been ridiculously fun; short fiction is always going to be my first love as a writer, and I've missed the hell out of it.  I've already written a sequel to the (recently published in Beneath Ceaseless Skies) Ill-Met at Midnight, and I'm currently getting into what was supposed to be a short story but appears to be becoming a novelette titled "War of the Rats", set in ... um ... well, in WW1 actually, because I might not be ready to write a novel yet, but I've been itching to put some of my new-found knowledge to use.  Oh, and I've promised Lavie Tidhar a story.  But the less said about that the better.

So that's December.  January, meanwhile, is absolutely goddamn set in stone as 'starting new novel month.'   So if there's another post here in a month's time explaining why I haven't got down to it then please do me a favour and come find me and kick my arse.

Ill-Met at Midnight in Beneath Ceaseless Skies

Lovely, lovely Beneath Ceaseless Skies cover art

I've said it before, but one of the best things about being a genre writer is surely the way that utterly bizarre blog post titles just seem to generate themselves.

Anyway.

One of the other nicest things about being a genre writer was receiving a blurb for Giant Thief from Adrian Tchaikovsky, whose Shadows of the Apt series I'm hugely fond of, comparing it to the works of none other than the mighty Fritz Leiber.  As fantastic a compliment as that was, though, I've never been entirely sure that Giant Thief lives up to it.  (Although, in fairness to Adrian, it's probably a closer comparison than anyone else has made.)  Thing is, I hadn't actually read any Leiber at the time I wrote Giant Thief, and so he wasn't - as he would come to be - one of my all-time favourite Fantasy authors.  What similarities there are are purely coincidental, or else were absorbed through intermediaries; there's a fair bit of the Gray Mouser in Damasco, for example, but I suspect it was contracted via Pratchett's blundering wizard Rincewind, another protagonist who spends an inordinate amount of time trying to flee from whatever plot he's found himself mixed up in.

Ill-Met at Midnight, on the other hand, the story I have out in Beneath Ceaseless Skies this week, is me blatantly pastiching Leiber.  Heck, the title is an obvious reference.  The city of Cold Harbour, elegant, rotten and riddled with licensed murder, has plenty in common with that greatest of all cities Lankhmar.  My "hero" Otranto, assassin extraordinaire, is definitely Leiberesque: sharp-tongued, highly competent, and yet driven by the winds of his own eccentricities.  It's the story of a weird and dangerous world full of weird and dangerous individuals, and I think that description about sums up all of Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories.

I'm happy admitting all this: originality is a wonderful thing and something to strive for, but sometimes I think it's okay to play around in the shadows of your heroes.  It was great fun to write Ill-Met, to cut loose with world-building aspects and to have a go at that kind of lurid, exaggerated, extravagant Fantasy, something I'm not sure you see so much of these days.  So much fun, in fact, that I suspect I'll return to Otranto and Cold Harbour one of these days.

You can read Ill-Met at Midnight and its companion story, Henry Szabranski's The Clay Farima, or buy the issue that contains them, here ... or, if you didn't mind waiting ,you can listen to Ill-Met in podcast in a month's time.

New Sales: Pseudopod and Beneath Ceaseless Skies

It's been a surprisingly good few weeks for short fiction sales, especially given that I haven't had a whole load of time to send stuff out lately, what with all the work on Prince Thief and Endangered Weapon and, oh, that day job thing I try not to think about.

First up recently came Pseudopod, taking my short story Prisoner of Peace - also recently accepted for Eric Guignard's very-likely-to-be-wonderful After Death anthology - and, due to some scheduling mix-ups and my usual confusion, leading to me tying myself in knots over whether a story that had been accepted but not printed could actually be called a reprint.  Fortunately it can, since After Death comes out in March / April time and Pseudopod are planning to run Prisoner on the anniversary of the Nagasaki bombing, for reasons that I can't explain without giving the whole thing away.*

Then, soon after, Beneath Ceaseless Skies editor Scott Andrews expressed interest in my Leiber-pastichingly-titled tale Ill-Met At Midnight**, with some reservations ... he wasn't entirely sold on the ending and asked me to make a few changes.  I duly went back to it, while sitting in the roof garden of our hotel in Marrakesh on a sunny December afternoon - one of the most pleasant bits of writing I've ever done.  And it did the trick!

Clearly, there's a moral here.  I now know where I've been going wrong all these years, and it has everything to do with not writing everything in beautifully sunny North African locations.  Expect this to be redressed the very moment I make enough money to emigrate...





* In fact, come to think of it, running it on the anniversary of Nagasaki already gives the game away a bit.  But it's also very appropriate, so I think it's probably okay.

** Which I recently read aloud at Fantasycon 2012, if you happen to be one of the nine people who was there.