Short Story News November 2019

I don't think I can honestly say anymore that it's been a bad year for short fiction, I've had a bit too much stuff out for that; a story a month since back in May, it seems, now that I bother to check!  Okay, it's certainly been among the less profitable, and that does suck when you're trying to keep the wolf from the door, but on the other hand I've had work in some exciting markets, and perhaps, with my focus now almost entirely on novels and novellas, that's the most I can ask for?

For example, it's hard to feel really bad about a year that included my first ever appearance in a best-of anthology; I've mentioned it before, but now that the book's actually out, I guess I get to be excited about NewCon Press's Best of British Science Fiction 2018 collection all over again, and how my story Cat and Mouse is sitting alongside tales by a bunch of the best UK writers working in the genre today.

Mind you, as much as I admire those folks, none of them can hold a candle to my favourite genre author of all time, the mighty H. G. Wells, an author I revere so highly that I basically wrote H. G. Wells fan-fiction in the shape of my (obviously unofficial!) War of the Worlds follow-up The Last of the Martians.  The story was a real labour of love; I only realised how much so when I went to try and sell it and realised how niche it was.  So thank goodness a two-volume anthology of Wells-inspired fiction should come along, and that volume one of A Tribute to H. G. Wells was devoted entirely to Wells's masterpiece.  I'm yet to get my contributor copy, but I had a glance over a friend's and it certainly seems well worth checking out.

Perhaps the thing I'm most excited by, though, is getting another story into Interzone, after my first appearance way back in the January 2014 issue.  I'm sure you don't need me to tell you that Interzone is one of the finest and longest-lived genre magazines on the planet, and it's almost unquestionably the most stunningly presented, so it's a joy to be inside its covers once again.  And I'm all the more glad that it's this story, Parasite Art, a piece I consider to be high among the best science-fiction I've written.  It's also the rare occasion where I use fiction to talk, even obliquely, about creativity; I've always been determined not to do that whole Stephen King "yes, all my protagonists are writers, but they're not me" thing, but I guess I also had some ideas that I really needed to work through around the forcedly collaborative nature of getting art out into the world, and wrapping them up amid crazy far-future SF seemed the most sensible way to go about it.

Speaking of crazy far-future SF - no, that's a rubbish link, my last story isn't crazy at all, it's just desperately bleak.  I've been struggling to unload Life Without Possibility for a long while now, not I don't think because it's rubbish but more likely because it's pretty damn unremitting.  I mean, the protagonist is in prison on multiple life sentences, for very deserved reasons, and they're if anything the victim of what takes place, something made worse by the fact that the society they inhabit imagines it's doing them a favour.  I've always been intrigued by notions of forgiveness and repentance and how that ties in (or totally doesn't) with how our punitive systems function, and this story digs into some of the least comfortable aspects of those themes.  It's not fun, but hopefully it's thought-provoking, and I was pleased indeed when UK 'zine Write Ahead / The Future Looms agreed to take it off my hands.  This is my second appearance there, after having a piece in their debut issue, and I'm pleased to report that the teething troubles I mentioned back then have definitely been sorted.  This time around was a good experience, the end result is beautifully presented, and I'm happy to recommend these guys as an exciting market to check out, both from a writerly and a readerly perspective.  Seriously, take a look!  Here's some links...

Write Ahead / The Future Looms
A Tribute to H. G. Wells anthology (on Amazon)
The Best of British Science Fiction 2018 (on Amazon)
Interzone 284 (on Amazon)

Short Story News May 2019

As usual these days, the short story news isn't exactly coming thick and fast.  Apparently it's been six months since I had anything to say on that front!  But I figure I've gathered enough to more than justify a post, especially when there are a couple of seriously exciting bits of news to share.

If we're being honest, the two stories I had out over the Christmas period don't fall into that category.  It was nice to have new work released, but not so much so when both suffered from some rather wonky editing.  In the case of new UK-based cyberpunk magazine Write Ahead, I'm happy to put that down to teething troubles, since my story Glamorous Corpses appeared in the very first issue, and the general quality of the fiction and some lovely design work made the editorial slip-ups easier to ignore - though it was tough not to feel sorry for the author whose story appeared with line breaks inserted after every few words!  But these things happen, right?  And I sincerely hope this little 'zine sticks around, because the presentation is terrific.  There have been a couple more issues since, and I'd tentatively recommend picking them up; I get the impression that the folks behind it were keen to learn from what they hadn't got quite right.

I can't be quite so positive about the Bubble Off Plumb collection that Feral Cat Publishers put out.  Honestly, my hopes for this one were muted after some not-so-great experiences in the run up to its release, and the end result is pretty much what I was expecting - though I hadn't guessed how many of the stories would be by the editorial team, so I guess I can still be surprised!  As with any anthology, there are a few good pieces in there, though most would fare better with less typos.  At any rate, I'm hoping my story Cat and Mouse wasn't a low point, and there's a bit of evidence on that front because - and here we finally get to the legitimately good news portion of this post! - it wasn't long before it got picked up for my first ever best-of.  That would be NewCon Press's Best of British Science-Fiction anthology, which should be out pretty soon, and has one heck of a line-up: you can see the wonderful company I'm in here.

Speaking of great company, a bit of news I think I nodded toward last time but couldn't yet come out with was that I've another story in one of those gorgeous anthologies that Flame Tree Publishing keep creating.  This time it's Step Light, which originally appeared in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine.  And as ever, the lineup is a mix of newer and classic fiction, which means that, along with numerous fantastic contemporary authors, I've now been published alongside Oscar Wilde and Fyodor Dostoevsky.  I mean, Fyodor goddamn Dostoevsky!  When you talk about wanting to appear alongside your personal favourite writers, you sort of don't expect it to include your actual literary heroes, but thanks to this series I've done awfully well on that front.  You can find the full lineup here, and if you're curious as to where we contributors that aren't long dead got our ideas from you can learn about that here, or if you'd like to discover a bit about influences and writing practices then that would be here.  Since my author copies are apparently in the post, I'm pretty certain this one's already out to buy, and I can't stress enough how fantastic and beautifully made these books are.

Speaking of classic authors, in a post that's lending itself well to neat links between paragraphs, I have managed to sell at least one original piece in recent months, rare as that's becoming, and if Dostoevsky is one of my all time literary heroes then H. G. Wells absolutely tops that list.  Want to learn how to write short genre fiction?  Then read Wells, because no one has ever done a better job of it.  There aren't many authors I'd write what amounts to fan fiction for, let alone dream of creating an unofficial sequel to one of their best known works, but I love the hell out of Wells and The War of the Worlds is one of my all time favourite novels, and somehow that led to my coming up with The Last of the Martians, a follow-up that also has the temerity to challenge some of the basic assumptions in the one of the great SF novels of all time.  Basically, if you're looking for a pacifist epilogue to a novel that literally has the word "war" right there in the title then I've got you covered.  And it'll be appearing in the A Tribute to H. G. Wells anthology from Belanger Books, somewhere toward the back end of the year, with a Kickstarter campaign coming in the meantime.

Weirdly though, given how exciting all of the above is, the sales I was most thrilled for weren't even in English.  I've had a couple of pieces out in translation - I learned recently that my story Stockholm Syndrome has made it into multiple languages, including Spanish and Korean, courtesy of John Joseph Adams and his terrific The Living Dead anthology - but it was only last year that I actually got directly approached by an overseas publisher.  So for the same to happen twice in rapid succession was definitely a shock.

First came The Only Way Out Lies Farther In, in what I take to be an Italian version of the 'zine in which the story first appeared, The Dark, appropriately named Il Buio.  And that was certainly cool, though they did change the title without asking ... I mean, Il Labirinto is fine and all, but it's not half so wordy and pretentious!  But I can't read Italian, and there's a reasonable chance I won't ever be able to read Italian, whereas I've been learning Japanese for the last year and change and I genuinely do hope that one day I'll be able to work my way through the May 2019 issue of Japanese weird fiction venue Nightland Quarterly, as published by Atelier Third.  I got a request from them out of the blue to use The Way of the Leaves, as featured in my collection The Sign in the Moonlight and Other Stories, and I was hardly about to say no, was I?  I've yet to see a copy, but the cover is cool, and I've already learned that my name in katakana comes out as David Terraman, which is a useful thing to know.

And that's it for the moment, though I've vague hopes of devoting a bit more time to short fiction in the second half of the year, and I'm steadily plugging away at a second collection of horror and dark fantasy, which may or may not eventually see the light of day!  I mean, it will, one way or another, I'm just not sure how I get to that point quite yet...

Short Story News November 2018

I was grumbling back in June about what a dreadful year this was turning out to be for short fiction sales, and as I was planning this post I was concerned the point would be that things really haven't picked up at all.  But what do you know?  Thankfully a last-minute twist has pushed the back end of 2018 from okay to actually pretty good!

And to be honest, even without that, a handful of really brilliant events had already gone a long way toward turning the year around.  If there was nothing else, I'd still be thrilled to have The Only Way Out Lies Farther In in top horror 'zine The Dark, a market I never thought I'd crack until I suddenly somehow did.  This one's a deeply personal story in which nothing is based directly on my life - which is to say that I poured a lot of me in there and every last drop got squeezed out of its original shape, leaving a tale that's at the same time almost entirely autobiographical and totally fictitious.  As such, it's personally one of the most frightening things I've written, which makes it tricky to guess what effect it's likely to have on others.  Fortunately, the one review I've seen suggests that it's quite capable of getting under somebody else's skin as well.

And speaking of recent horror fiction I feel really good about, Casualty of Peace, a ghost story that's actually more a meditation on the psychological traumas of the home front experience in the world wars - fun, right! - has been out for a second time in another of Flame Tree Publishing's utterly gorgeous anthologies, this one titled Lost Souls, which couldn't be more appropriate for that particular tale.  It also came to the notice of Best Horror of the Year anthologist Ellen Datlow, getting me another honourable mention, which was pretty cool in an "Ever the bridesmaid" sort of way.  At any rate, it's brilliant that a lot more people will be reading a piece I'm seriously proud of.

And here I am, still not having mentioned the absolutely best thing, or at any rate the one that's likely to stay with me when I'm old and grey and trying to make some sense of what this whole writing lark was about.  I've been a huge fan of Adrian Tchaikovsky's Shadows of the Apt series ever since I picked up the first volume, thinking I was doing him a favour for kindly blurbing Giant Thief, and got helplessly hooked to the intricate, outlandish, original world he'd built.  So when Adrian asked if I wanted to play around there, the answer was self-evident.  And funnily enough, the tale I wanted to tell was too: there was a question that had been bugging me - er, pun genuinely not intended! - for a fair old while, and a character whose back story I was desperate to know, and I got to put the two together and craft a tiny chunk of actual Apt lore.  Seriously, there's a minor character in that series that now has a history created entirely by me, and that's about the single awesomest thing that's happened since I began this madness over a decade ago.  If you want to know who and what, or even if you don't, I highly recommend you grab a copy of the fourth and final Tales of the Apt short fiction anthology from NewCon Press, because it also contains sterling work from authors such as Pete Newman, Frances Hardinge, Justina Robson and - writing the best piece in the book, for my money - Keris McDonald.  That story, and the collection itself, are called The Scent of Tears, and you can find it here.


After that, anything's going to seem a bit anticlimactic, but I do have a handful of new sales to report.  Even better, two of them are for new fiction, a prospect that was starting to seem increasingly remote for a while.  They're both older pieces that I've faithfully been trying to home for many a year now, too, which makes it all the more satisfying.  Cat and Mouse, a sci-fi parable based on my experiences in London - though, weirdly, written before I ever actually went to London - will be appearing in the Bubble Off Plumb anthology from Feral Cat Publishers at some not too distant point in the future.  And Glamorous Corpses, a thoroughly mean-spirited bit of cyberpunk that I wrote at work, in a job I despised, about eight years ago, is already out in new UK magazine Write Ahead / The Future Looms.  Then there's the most recent one, which since it happened this week I probably oughtn't to talk about, but I guess I can safely say that it's a pro sale to one of my absolutely favourite markets.

Oh, I nearly forgot!  I accidentally discovered that the The Living Dead anthology - containing my story Stockholm Syndrome - is available in a whole multitude of languages ... I think it's at least Spanish, Korean, and Russian, which is a fairly random selection, all told!  Editor John Joseph Adams was kind enough to chuck me over a copy of the Spanish edition, which looks great and does a commendable job of mistranslating both the city where I got my degree and my actual name.  Which makes me kind of want to learn Spanish to find out what other wacky misunderstandings are in there!  Anyway, that means I've now had work out in a total of at least five languages that aren't English, and isn't that a nice note to end on?