The Life and Times of Digital Science Fiction

So once upon a time I sold a story called Black Sun to a new pro-rate market named Digital Science Fiction, and it appeared in their debut issue, an anthology by the appropriate name of First Contact.  It turned out to be a strong collection, considerably better and more professional than first issues are wont to be.  And so soon after that I sent them a second story, Across the Terminator, which was scheduled to appear in their fifth collection ... until circumstances got in the way and DSF was forced to close its doors.

This was a bad thing.  Not actually directly for me, since I eventually resold the story to Clarkesworld, but nevertheless, in the wider publishing-cosmology sense, a solid piece of bad news all round.  Good, well-paying markets don't exactly grow on trees, and even in a brief space of time DSF had shown itself to be something exciting and valuable.

Then, a few months ago, publisher Michael Wills got in touch to tell me that he was bringing Digital Science Fiction back in a new and improved format, and would I be interested in letting him reprint the story that would have appeared in anthology number five had it happened all those years ago?  Of course I said yes, because money obviously, but also because Michael had always been a pleasure to work with and the whole thing just felt right.  He'd been immensely positive about Across the Terminator back in the day and, as nice as it had been to have it in Clarkesworld (it really was nice) it still somehow felt like DSF was where it belonged.

Since then I've sold a couple more reprints to Michael: The Painted City came out a while back on its own and is now collected as part of the Infinity Cluster collection, out this weekend and on special offer until the end of today.  And Dancing in the Winter Rooms, originally published way back when in Electric Velocipede, is scheduled to appear in the not-too-distant future as a solo e-book and then, some time later, as part of anthology number seven, to be known as Ctrl Alt Delight.

Anyway, putting aside as much as I can the fact that they've published a fair bit of my work, I heartily recommend taking a look at what Digital Science Fiction - and for that matter its brand new sister company Digital Fantasy Fiction - are up to.  I've read all of their output so far and enjoyed, I would say, about eighty percent of it, which is considerably above what I'd normally expect, hard to please git that I am.  There's a definite leaning towards solid storytelling above overbearing style, and yet within that, an impressive range of approaches, subjects and attitudes that keeps any two books from feeling overly alike.  And on top of that, there's an appealing Pokemon-esque quality to the fact that these things are coming out weekly; it's weirdly addictive to keep picking them up, never quite knowing what to expect.

For that matter, I'd also recommend DSF and DFF as markets to fellow authors.  There aren't that many places that will pay for reprints, and there are considerably fewer that will do anything so lavish as putting them out as individual e-books with their own shiny covers.  All told, Digital Science Fiction feels to me like an interesting new corner of the genre publishing world, one excitingly different from anything else out there, and I suspect that if it gets embraced the way it deserves to then it's only going to grow in strength and scope over the next few months.

Oh, and if you should fancy a read of any of the works listed, all titles link to their respective stories / anthologies on Amazon...

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.

Thoughts on Judging the British Fantasy Awards

So I mentioned last week that I was one of the three judges for this year's British Fantasy Award for best short fiction, and mentioned too that while I felt the result we came to was a definite win, whereby an excellent story gamboled off with the prize - that being Signs of the Times by Carole Johnstone, as published in Black Static #33 - there were also a few hurdles and moments of doubt along the way.

For instance, I'd by fibbing if I didn't say that I found the initial shortlist disappointing.  Not because there was anything wrong with the stories put forward but because the list seemed symptomatic of failings I'd noted before in regards to the British Fantasy Awards: too much emphasis on Horror over Fantasy, too many small press markets, too many British markets and - the one that personally galled me most - too many low or non-paying markets.

Before I upset anyone unduly, I should put all of that into some kind of perspective.  I've nothing against Horror as a genre, I've written enough of it, and I don't even object to it straying into what's nominally a Fantasy award so long as there's a reasonable balance.  I've certainly nothing against the British small press, nor against British publishing, having had three novels and a chapbook out from UK publishers both large and small.  Non-paying markets, admittedly, I have a certain theoretical disagreement with, but I'm ready to concede that there are exceptions that make the publishing landscape a better place.  My point isn't that these things are bad in and of themselves, it's that put all together they don't do much to represent the current state of Fantasy publishing.  The small press unquestionably produces some superb work, but so do the many professional magazines out there - markets like Clarkesworld, Shimmer and Apex, to pick a few - and a list that included none of them felt blinkered.  To fall back on a word I've used on this subject before, the initial shortlist felt like provincialism; a British Fantasy Award that was all too close to actually, literally, being a British Fantasy Award.

And there ends the grumbling portion of this post.  Because while, if I remember correctly, there was a time not so long ago when the winning story would have been selected from that initial short list, that time is now past.  These days, the judges (I seem to remember a time when there weren't those either, but honestly it's hard to tell if I'm just making this stuff up) can add a couple of stories of their  mutually-agreed choosing, and what we decided to do - this not being a terribly difficult decision - was to add in the next two runners-up.

Honestly, it sounds like such a small thing, but it made all the difference.  Suddenly there was a better balance of genres, a better balance of markets, of writers ... and what made it most satisfying was that it also felt completely in the spirit of the award.  We weren't overruling the voters, just widening their selection a little.  And now we had seven stories to choose from, and somehow that list of seven felt in every way stronger than the original list of five.

That said, I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that Signs of the Times, our eventual winner, did come from the original short list.  Or that the story that everyone agreed was its closest contender was one of the two that we added.  Take from that what you will, but to me it says that things worked out nicely; that the combination of a membership ballot and a jury decision can yield both a strong shortlist and a solid result.

Is that to say the current situation is perfect?  Not entirely.  Regardless of the quality of the story itself, I personally feel that a story that appeared in a British Fantasy Society publication shouldn't have been eligible; for me that harks back too closely to the British Fantasy Awards of old.  Part of me feels, too, that putting novelettes and chapbooks up against shorter stories published in magazines is unfair to both, though I'm not one hundred percent sure why or what the answer would be.  I certainly don't think there's a need for British Fantasy Award for best novelette, but perhaps the current length bracket is a touch too broad.  And of course the greatest limitation on the British Fantasy Awards continues to be the membership size of the British Fantasy Society; with such a relatively small voter pool, there are always bound to be some curious nominations and results.

But you know what?  Awards don't have to be perfect.  And, as I touched on last week, nor can they be, because perfection lays awfully far outside of their purview.  What awards can do is make sure that things that are awesome get recognition they might not otherwise have done.  And, in my wholly biased opinion, that's exactly what happened - not only with the one I had a hand in judging but with this year's awards in general.  So, while I wouldn't mind seeing a little more tightening of the rules - seriously, BFS-published stories should not be getting nominated for BFS-issued awards - I'm really glad that things appear to be on the right track, and here's hoping that this year was an indication of what we can expect to see from the British Fantasy Award in the future.

2013: Or, Phase IV

I've been a little troubled at the prospect of putting together my end-of-the-year round up, truth be told.  I try to be positive here at Writing on the Moon, because I fervently believe that writing is a thing to be positive about, but the flip side of that is that I've always intended this blog to be an honest account of my career and there are some things that are just very difficult to put a positive spin on.  For me, for the most part, 2013 has been one of those things.

It certainly got off to a difficult start.  Of the three Damasco books, the writing of Prince Thief had been by far the hardest; I've no doubt it's possible to write a book in a year around a regular job without suffering any serious ill-effects, but when that day job involves things like twelve hour night shifts and inordinate amounts of travel it becomes, frankly, pretty tough.  And when you live like that for month after month, working up to seventy hours a week, doing little else and not sleeping anything like enough, after a while your health starts to suffer.  Hell, everything starts to suffer.

What made the experience just shy of impossible, though, was that I had a fair idea of what was in store for Prince Thief.  Giant Thief had performed moderately well, but not well enough for Crown Thief to receive much publisher support or attention from bloggers and reviewers, because sequels don't attract anything like the sort of interest that debuts do.  By the time I started Prince Thief, I'd been reliably informed that I should expect proportionately less again.

Looking back, that's seems a lot more like common sense than it did at the time: you'll always be preaching to the converted with the third book in a trilogy.  But at the time, the cost seemed just too much; I knew I was making myself unwell and causing distress to the people close to me to write a book that couldn't hope to achieve the sort of things you hope a book will achieve, and it broke my heart a little.

All of that was more of less done with by the end of March, but it cast a long shadow.  Even with my writing efforts dialed down I was still doing at least one and a half jobs, the exhaustion never quite went away, and things continued to be a struggle.  In retrospect, I might have done better to slacken the pace a little more; as it was, I spent the next few months feeling like I was doing far less than I should have been.  I'd have liked to have worked much more to promote the launch of Endangered Weapon B;  I enjoyed coming up with my first novella, insane sci-fantasy oddity Patchwerk, but it cost more in time and effort than I'd been expecting.  It was really only when I put the day job once and for all behind me in October that things began to settle down, and only in the past month that I've felt like everything was more or less back under control.

-oOo-

For all that I've sure as hell done it in this post, I don't like moaning.  I still remember with perfect clarity what it's like to be an unpublished author, as I imagine some of the people who'll read this will be, and I know that I've been very, very fortunate to make it as far as I have, in the ways that I have.  I wanted more than anything to have a book published and now I have five out there, in various shapes and sizes and - regardless of how hard I worked for it, regardless of anything - that is a thing of utter awesomeness.  As is the fact that I've finally achieved my other lifetime goal this year, to make writing my day job.

So, for all of those reasons, and because sometimes it's nice to remind yourself of all the good stuff, here's a list of the things that happened in 2013 that were actually pretty amazing:

• I sold a story to Clarkesworld and, with the year nearly out, to Interzone, two markets I've been chasing ever since I started writing seriously.  It was, in fact, a pretty great year for short fiction sales, all told.

• In the end, I finished one novel, two graphic novels, one novella, a novelette and three short stories. Under the circumstances, that doesn't feel like a bad haul.

• I completed my first trilogy.  The Tales of Easie Damasco are out there now, and I'm very proud of them.  They have stunning Angelo Rinaldi covers.  They're read wonderfully by James Langton in the superb Brilliance Audio audiobook adaptations.  They exist in the world, they're finding readers and listeners, and the more time goes by, the more I appreciate that fact.

• Endangered Weapon B is out there too, after some five or so years of trying to make it a reality, and I love it to pieces.  Of the many things I have to be thankful for, high on the list is that I've been able to work with Bob Molesworth, a great artist who I have no doubt is going to become an extraordinary artist over the next few years.

• I'm now writing full time. It's impossible to exaggerate just how much even typing those words feels like a gigantic weight coming off.  2014 is the year when I get to start writing the way I want, instead of the way I can somehow manage to fit around my day job.  2014 is the year when producing a book a year is suddenly the absolute least I can do, and when I get to put together some of the projects I've had to tread water on these last couple of years.  And, since this is the stage of my career that I've long been referring to as phase 4 in my Stalinesque ten year mental plan, 2014 is also, quite possibly, the year when ants take over the world.

         If that's not something to look forward to then I don't know what is.

Book Review: The Eye With Which the Universe Beholds Itself

Truth be told, I was disappointed with Ian Sales's sophomore novella, The Eye With Which the Universe Beholds Itself.  It would have had to be pretty amazing to feel like a worthy successor to Ian's BSFA award winning debut Adrift on the Sea of Rains, which I praised effusively on this selfsame blog a while back.  And, as I read it, I found it to be merely very good.  Harsh criticism indeed!

I'd have been fine with writing it off as that, too, for good as Ian is - and he's annoyingly good - you don't get to produce two masterpieces in a row, do you?

Only...

Well, my brain keeps going back to it.  Both to the clever, maybe too clever but definitely very clever mystery at its heart - which is in fact the entire story, and then some - and, perhaps more satisfyingly, to the emotional kick that it spends fifty or so pages winding up, so slowly you don't quite see it coming.  I'm a sucker for hidden people-stories, stories that keep their human element close to their chests until you realize that, hey, this isn't just about science (or fantasy, or crime, or...) it's about how human relationships are (or aren't) sustained within the climes of those genres.  My own best effort in that direction was up at Clarkesworld recently, and it's frustrating to admit that The Eye With Which the Universe Beholds Itself probably does a slightly better job of exactly what I was going for there, is in fact a hidden people-story par excellence ... a love story of sorts, and a lovely, mature, perceptive and ultimately brutal one at that. 

That aside, The Eye With Which... does the things that Ian is rightly developing a reputation for, and does them more or less as well as you'd hope.  This is hard, hard science fiction, grounded in the grubby danger and endless minutiae of the real US space program and then extrapolated with wit and verve.  It's excellently written, carefully composed, bold in its use and abuse of the limitations of the novella format, (who else devotes a seventh of their book to a glossary, and then hides half of their plot in it?), and - something which perhaps doesn't get quite enough attention - beautifully put together and presented.

I'm still not convinced that The Eye With Which the Universe Beholds Itself is the equal of its predecessor, but I've also come to the conclusion that it's more than just very good.  Ian is doing something genuinely fascinating with his Apollo Quartet, and I'm intrigued to see how it all works out.

Crown Thief Out in Audiobook, and Other Listenables

I've been looking forward to the Brilliance Audio adaptation of Crown Thief coming out.

As I've explained before, it would be undeniably weird and inappropriate and self-indulgent to read your own book, but no one ever said you can't listen to it.  Which is a good thing, because it's much more fun anyway, especially when you have the excellent James Langton returning to do his thing and make your book a good bit wittier and more entertaining than it ever was on the page.

I loved James's take on Giant Thief, so much so that I think it might have become the official version in my head; by the time I got to writing Prince Thief, I couldn't help noticing I'd mentally adopted James's accents for some of my major players - Marina Estrada is forever going to have an Irish lilt in my head now - and I can't wait to hear what he's made of some of the new players.  I have a feeling that his take on Synza, and one particular Synza-starring scene in particular (if you've read it, I'm sure you know which I mean*) is going to be a whole lot of fun.

Since I'm being hopelessly unrepentant about how much I enjoy podcasts of my own work, I should admit that I also recently listened to John Rubinstein's totally appropriate reading of The Sign in the Moonlight at Nightmare, and that I've made a start on Kate Baker's elegant, understated take on Across the Terminator, recently posted at the mighty Clarkesworld.


* Or, thinking about it, if you've seen the cover.

Across the Terminator in Clarkesworld

Since I started submitting short fiction, many, many moons ago, there have been a handful of markets I never really dared imagine I'd make it into.  Over the years, as the rejections from those markets piled up, that doubt hardened into a certainty, and eventually I even began to accept it.  Some things just aren't meant to be.  I'd never break that absolutely top rung of professional markets, in the same way that I'd never climb Everest or play professional ice hockey or box with Uwe Boll.  It's okay to have realistic aspirations and to know your limits.  I kept sending - because you have to, don't you? - but the thoughtfully worded rejections kind of stopped registering after a while.

Then last week I sold a story to Clarkesworld.

So, colour me surprised.  And also very, very pleased.  And still a little shocked and stupefied.

Especially since the story in question is getting quite long in the tooth now, and especially since this isn't even the first time I've sold it to a professional market.  It was scheduled to be in Digital Science Fiction, a promising 'zine that I was really sad to see stop publishing just before Across the Terminator was due to come out.  So I guess the fact that I've sold it to two pro markets in a row means it must be one of my best short stories; it's certainly one of my favourites ... but then then I always say that, don't I?  It's about love and politics and it's set on the moon, one of those subjects I seem to keep coming back to, and unlike a lot of my science fiction it contains some actual real science that I did actual research to try and make sound plausible.

You can read Across the Terminator here, or follow the links from the Clarkesworld home page to pick up this issue in any electronic format you can realistically think of.