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.

This is Getting Ridiculous (in a Good Way, Obviously) ...

...but then, it isn't all that long since things were ridiculous in a bad way.

According to the absurdly overcomplicated spreadsheet I've been using for six years or so now to track my submissions, the longest I've gone between short fiction sales is 202 days, or a little under seven months.  However, since one of those publishers subsequently gave up the goat before putting out my story, that's a deceptive figure.  Does an acceptance that doesn't actually lead to a published story count for an awful lot?  Discounting that statistical anomaly then, the longest I've gone without a short fiction sale is a whopping 292 days.

To put that in some context, I submitted 103 stories during that period - a comparatively low number for me, but still a fair few.  For a bit more context, I should mention that this lengthy and alarming drought happened fairly recently, between July of last summer and April of this one.  My track record up until that point had been erratic, but I had a fair few sales behind me, many of them to professional and well-established semi-pro markets.  The stories I was sending out were a blend of old and new, which is usually the case with me.  I was submitting to a wide-ranging mix of recently established and long standing markets,  including a few who'd taken my work before; again, nothing particularly unusual about that.  All told, it was a fairly typical period - asides from the fact that the editors of the world seemed to have collectively decided to avoid my work like it was infected with rat cooties.

Then again, according to that selfsame spreadsheet, I've just now sold four stories in eight days.  I've already raved about the ones to Andromeda Spaceways, Nil Desperandum and Dark Tales of Lost Civilisations, and I was happy and willing to accept that I'd met my good news quota for August by the point that new (and already-best-selling-on-Amazon) pro market Digital Science Fiction got back to me to say they'd like to take my Across the Terminator.

Which is, of course, fabulous news - and all the more so for coming on the back of so much other fabulous news.  I seriously enjoyed the first issue of DSF, (which contained my Black Sun and can be purchased here should you have the urge), and I'm completely in awe of how they've comes out of nowhere to become one of the more impressive professional markets in little more than the blink of an eye.

But it does leave me wondering more than ever about the vicissitudes of this zany industry.

Average it all out, of course, and I definitely can't complain.  And even during that phenomenal dry patch, it's not as if there weren't plenty of other good things going on - like, oh say, the run-up to the three book deal with Angry Robot.  I realise there are bad times and good times in everything, and writing is no exception - to say the absolute least.  I mean, comparing the highs and lows of my day job to the highs and lows of my writing career would be to put a line of gently rolling hills and valleys up against a crazy mountain range.  No, I guess my point here is partly just "whee!  I sold another story to Digital Science Fiction!" and partly, "man, there really isn't any way to make sense of this stuff."

So come on, fellow writer types ... is it just me?  Or are these improbably compressed highs and months-long lows just par for the course?  Can anyone beat that better-part-of-a-year-long run of rejections?  Can any publishers offer wise words to explain all this apparent randomness? Is there a secret cabal involved?  Are names pulled from hats? Is any of this to do with that time I sacrificed a raccoon to Stephen King? 

Passive Resistance Sold to Redstone ... and Other Excitements

I mentioned a looooong time ago that my cyberpunk-for-people-who-can't-work-computers story Passive Resistance had been picked up for an anthology, the title of which escapes me, by a publisher called Mythica Publishing.  Well, that was one bit of excitingness that fell flat on its face, what with Mythica turning out to be the kind of unscrupulous self-publishing type outfit that couldn't put out an anthology if ten thousand copies of it materialised from nowhere and proceeded to sell themselves to an unsuspecting public.

Which seemed like bad news at the time.  What I obviously couldn't have predicted is that it was in fact completely brilliant - since if Mythica hadn't keeled over like a geriatric donkey, I couldn't have just sold Passive Resistance to Redstone Science Fiction.  Since Mythica were planning to pay me precisely nothing, (and would probably have picked my pockets given half the chance), and Redstone just gained their SFWA professional market pointy magic hat, it's hard to see this as any other than a profoundly lucky escape.  Which, funnily enough, is precisely one of the things that Passive Resistance is about.  At times like this, it almost feels like the universe isn't a big chaotic bubble of meaningless crazy!

In other news ... I knew on a vague intellectual level that there was probably going to be a Lightspeed Year One anthology, including my Jenny's Sick, but the discovery that it was both real and a mere four months away still set me bouncing round the room like a trained seal.  Halfway through the day, it struck me that a significant percentage of that excitement came not from the promise of more exposure for what I consider one of my better stories, but from the prospect that I'd be spending my Christmas holiday reading a year's worth of fiction from Lightspeed.  Of the many 'zines out there, it's high on my list of ones I wish I had the time to follow, so I can't help but look forward to the prospect of catching up on twelve months worth of Lightspeed goodness.

Lastly - and only leastly in that it doesn't directly involve anyone paying me money - I discovered yesterday that Digital Science Fiction's issue #1 anthology First Contact (which included my Black Sun) recently hit the number one sales spot in Amazon's science fiction anthologies kindle list, and is still riding high in the top ten.  Hats off to DSF for not only putting out an excellent first issue but for actually managing to persuade a sizeable number of people to read it.

Digital Science Fiction: First Contact Out in E-book

It's not often I manage to (a) get a copy of something I'm published in around the same time it comes out or (b) actually read it before I post about it.  Just for once, both of those things are true of new publisher Digital Science Fiction's first issue, suitably titled First Contact.  Thanks to the miracle of kindle and the slightly less miraculous fact that I was itching to read something on my Kindle - which, despite my fondness for the thing, has been sitting unused for about three months now - I'm completely on the ball with this one.

So, First Contact ... my first e-book in three months, and lo and behold, it was a good'un.  So much so that my lazy plan to namecheck my favourite three stories is scuppered, because I can't actually pick that few.  In the end, there were five tales that really stood out for me.

Ed Greenwood's Biting a Dead Man’s Hand was the first to hit home, by being an unremittingly fun and charming ride with a wicked, rather mad twist of an ending.  Ken Liu's The Caretaker built nicely and ended beautifully, handling a number of tricky topics with poise and sensitivity.  Edward J. Knight's Roanoke, Nevada reminded me of The Andromeda Strain, in a good way, and was another story that went after big issues with a scalpel rather than a sledge hammer.  Heading even further in that direction, Kenneth Schneyer's The Tortoise Parliament was a great bit of slow-burn fiction that took the risk of setting up its subject in real detail before bringing it all crashing down.  Lastly, Curtis James McConnell's Pop Quiz was the perfect close-out story, a well-told joke with a a brilliantly silly punchline.

Criticisms?  Well, it's completely hypocritical given that my entry, Black Sun, is as much horror as anything, but it would have nice to see maybe a couple more hard sci-fi stories in the mix - the bulk of what's presented here falls under the banner of what I'd call social science fiction.  Other than that, I'd struggle to find much at fault.  Which, considering this is a first issue, is certainly a good sign.

First Contact is (or imminently will be) available in any number of formats from various different places.  Rather than me list them all, here's the link to the Digital Science Fiction website again.

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...

Some Short Story Acceptances for 2011, All at Once

Not that I've any right to moan, what with the book deal and all, but it's been a rubbish few months for short fiction sales.  And not just rubbish but shockingly and confusingly rubbish, since asides from a couple of random slow patches, I was shifting work on a fairly regular basis for quite a while there.  Since July of last year, however, I've sold one tale - and that was to the now defunct Northern Frights Fallen anthology.  When you've got, on average, twenty pieces out at any given time, that's not such a great track record.

Well now I really haven't got any right to moan.

The good news started with new pro-rate market Digital Science Fiction picking up my story Black Sun, a bleak and vicious bit of Lovecraftian sci-fi / horror.  Actually, I say Lovecraftian, because that was the obvious jumping off point, but the biggest influence on this one was M. John Harrison - an undeniably great writer who blows me away and irritates the hell out of me by turns.  Black Sun was basically, "What if M. John Harrison wrote a Lovecraftian sci-fi horror story and left at home all the bits of his style that really wind me up, and then what if instead of it being M. John Harrison it was actually me?"

Now, obviously I'm no more capable of writing as well as M. John Harrison as I am of writing as well as H. P. Lovecraft - and less obviously, I don't think anyone would even realise I'd tried if I didn't tell them.  Still, it was worth a go, and I'm plenty happy with the results, even if they only read like David Tallerman.

Anyway.  It's always a bit dicey taking a chance on a new market, pro-rate or no.  But I've been stupidly lucky on this front in the past, what with Flash Fiction Online, Lightspeed and Bull Spec all picking up my work when they were barely out of diapers, and everything I've seen of Digital Science Fiction makes me think they'll be around for a long time to come.  They've been brilliantly professional in their dealings with me, and the developments on their website suggest they're putting together a quality product that'll make the world of sci-fi a wee bit more sexy and exciting.

Just as I was calming down from that one, I got another e-mail to say that Shadowcast are going to produce my story Caretaker in the Garden of Dreams, as previously published in the recently closed print magazine Necrotic Tissue.  And that was great, because I like Shadowcast, I always get a bit giddy about having stuff podcast, and it's nice to have things out in a format people can access for free, because it's not like anyone's got any money these days.

Then - and this was the point where it all got a bit silly - I got another e-mail from R. Scott McCoy, former editor of Necrotic Tissue, to say he's putting together a best-of anthology and would I be okay with Caretaker being a part of it?  Having never been in a best-of anything before, it's probably not even worth pointing out that I said yes.  And then maybe did a little dance in my writing chair.

So maybe where I've been going wrong for ten months is trying to sell any story other than Caretaker in the Garden of Dreams?  It's a lesson learned, all right.