The Sign in the Moonlight: The Door Beyond the Water

The Door Beyond the Water is at its core another early tale, from the period when I was very much in the thrall of Lovecraft and Poe and Machen and weird tales in general - a time that provided the backbone and impetus for what would eventually end up being The Sign in the Moonlight and Other Stories.  Like The Facts in the Case of Algernon Whisper's Karma, it first appeared in a brief-lived and little-read market called The Willows way back when, and like The Facts in the Case of Algernon Whisper's Karma it got something of an overhaul before I felt it was ready to stand alongside more recent work.

In the case of The Door Beyond the Water, however, that work had already been done beforehand, and had been a whole lot more comprehensive.  I originally rewrote it when I was approached by editor Eric Guignard to provide a story for his anthology Dark Tales of Lost Civilizations.  (Eric, incidentally, would publish another story from the collection, Prisoner of Peace, in his next anthology.)  I had nothing new to offer him, and as a compromise I offered to revise an older piece under a new title, with the understanding that it would be a substantial enough revision to actually warrant the change of name.  Eric was okay with that, so I went back to the story - it was The Gate in the Jungle at that point - with an excuse to really set about tearing it down and building it back up again, and the goal of having something by the end that I'd feel comfortable setting alongside the kind of stuff I was producing then.

It worked out well, all told.  I was fond of the original, but I think the revision brought the things I liked about it into much sharper perspective.  I said in an earlier one of these posts that the impetus for a lot of these stories to was to write slantwise homages, pieces that stayed true to the weird tales of the early decades of the twentieth century whilst finding new ways into them, in some cases ones that maybe weren't quite so alienating to a modern sensibility.  In that sense, The Door Beyond the Water was me locking horns with the assumptions about race, and about civilization, that are prevalent in so much work from the period.  It's a tale of that classic Victorian educated white chap coming into a situation he doesn't even slightly understand and making one unholy mess of things, basically - and also, now that I think, an excuse for my to play around with some of the shamanism stuff that came out of studying Elizabethan witchcraft for my post-grad degree.

Here, anyway, is an extract:

The message came to him in dreams, before the second moon of the season: A man comes to free the imprisoned one. Nothing more than that.

But for Cha Né - who was shaman, who saw beneath the mystery of things - that sentence was enough to darken his heart with fear such as he'd never known.

The next night he confronted his spirit-guide with the inevitable questions.  "Who is this man who comes? Is he of the mountain people? Is he from the hollow tribe?"  It hardly seemed possible, unless the ancient truces had been somehow corrupted.  "I must know, Shanoctoc."

The feathered guide had hesitated long before answering.  "He is Montague Evans.  He is not of the three tribes, nor of the lands between the water and the mountains.  He is a white man, of the tribe of Henry Johnson.  He will arrive before the third moon."

Then Cha Né’s guide, his one companion in the Otherworld, sank into the waters of the lake - was swallowed amidst shivering liquid tendrils.

Cha Né knew, without knowing how, that it was the last time they would ever meet.

Announcing The War of the Rats

As their officially delegated spokeshuman, it falls upon me to announce that the rat populace of the world is - as of this date, the 18th of January 2015 - declaring total war upon the human population of the Earth.  They've had enough, frankly, and they're just not going to take it any more.  Pack your bags, people, and start looking for another planet with more placid rodents, because as of tomorrow this one is officially Ratworld Prime.

No, wait, that's not at all what this post was supposed to be about.   (Shuffles notes.)

Hum.  Okay.  So, I mentioned a few incoming projects in my round-up of last year, and it was a huge relief, because all of them were things I've been getting horribly excited about for ages now and not been able to talk much about.  And, thinking about it, a couple of them still fall into that category - though hopefully for not too much longer - but there's one at least that I can finally announce, and so this is me doing just that.

Here's one of the illustrations we DIDN'T use.

The War of the Rats and Other Tales, as it's tentatively known, is my first single-author collection of short fiction.  It's coming out from Spectral Press, (you know Spectral, they get nominated for British Fantasy Awards with alarming reality and have or are due to publish work by most of the top writers in British horror,) in August of this year, in e-book, paperback and super special, limited edition hardback.  And all of those editions will include illustrations by my artist mate and long term collaborator Duncan Kay, who seems to get better by the month and is currently sending me stuff that, frankly, would make your toes curl.  Seriously, there's a reason I've wrangled Duncan into two of my major releases for this year, and that reason is that he's shockingly good at this illustrating lark.  Whatever else The War of the Rats and Other Tales is, it's going to look beautiful.

That possibly means that I run the risk of my stories being upstaged in my own first short story collection; still, if readers manage to tear their eyes from the pictures, I'm hopeful that some of my all-time best fiction is going into this thing.  I mean, we have stories that have appeared in some of my favourite markets: places like Nightmare, Bull Spec, Flash Fiction Online.  We've got a tale that was in a Stoker-nominated anthology, another that was in last year's Stoker winner, (which, by the way, also happens to be my personal choice for the best horror story I've written.)  Maybe most exciting for me, we have my Spectral novelette, previously only available in very limited edition, and a new novelette written at the end of last year especially for the collection.

That one's called The War of the Rats, funnily enough.  And it isn't about rats declaring war on humanity.  I just made all of that up.

Or ... did I?

No, I did.

After Death Stoker-Nominated

Another year, another Best Anthology Bram Stoker award nomination for top editor Eric J. Guignard, who I imagine as sitting right now in a huge armchair, possibly smoking a pipe, sighing with ennui at the fact that his second ever anthology has been nominated for a top industry award just like his first, Dark Tales of Lost Civilizations, was...

No, I'm joking, obviously, I don't at all think that's what Eric's doing; truth is, I'm sure he's thrilled to bits.  And rightly so.  It's a remarkable thing he's achieved, and both anthologies - I say this as objectively as I can as someone with stories in each - were pretty terrific.  But particularly, I think, After Death: it really was a bloody good collection, made that bit more bloody good by Audra Phillips's lovely illustration work, and it absolutely deserves to cart off an award.

You know what?  I'm confident it will, too.  And my predictions are almost never wrong, except for how when every time it snows I predict that Ragnarok has finally come and, look sharp!, the Ice Giants will be marching over the horizon at any moment.  That one, it's fair to say, has been consistently off.  (Although I remain confident that one of these days I'll get it right.)

Oh, while I'm at it, a quick nod for an anthology that isn't, so far as I know, up for any awards: 01 Publishing's Whispers From the Abyss anthology.  I really enjoyed it, there are some fine stories in there, and if this is the sort of thing 01 are going to put out then I wouldn't be surprised if they too find themselves up for one of them shiny Stoker thingamajigs in the not too distant future.

Dark Tales and Slices of Flesh Make Stoker Finals

Not an Oscar.

What a pleasure to get home last night to the news that not one but two anthologies I was in last year have made the finalist list for the 2013 Bram Stoker awards - those being Eric Guignard's Dark Tales of Lost Civilizations and Stan Swanson's flash collection Slices of Flesh.  I raise my imaginary hat (a trilby, only with a nice, jauntily angled Robin Hood-style feather in it) to them both, but Eric gets a little extra hat-tipping since Dark Tales was his editorial debut.  How many editors can lay credit to a Stoker nomination straight off the bat?

I probably can't take a great deal of credit for their success; then again, as Eric was nice enough to point out on Facebook, at least I clearly pick good projects.  So, editors take note: it's perfectly possible that inviting me into your anthology will statistically increase your likelihood of being nominated for a major industry award.  Well, it can't hurt to try, right?

Anyhow, in the interests of balance, here's the full list of finalists.  May the best book win!*

• Mort Castle and Sam Weller - Shadow Show (HarperCollins) 
• Eric J. Guignard - Dark Tales of Lost Civilizations (Dark Moon Books) 
• Eric Miller - Hell Comes to Hollywood (Big Time Books) 
• Mark C. Scioneaux, R. J. Cavender and Robert S. Wilson - Horror for Good: A Charitable Anthology (Cutting Block Press) 
• Stan Swanson - Slices of Flesh (Dark Moon Books) 

 
* So long as it's one of the two I was in, obviously.

The Glass Parachute

As much as I tried to be positive when I wrote my series of blog posts on the small press, the truth was that the articles came as much out of frustration at the more negative experiences I'd had with certain editors and magazines as it did from wanting to praise the things I felt the small press was getting right.  There'd been some great experiences along the way, but at that point I felt as though the bad was outweighing the good.  In fact, by the time I wrote the last post, I'd more or less decided to back off from the small press for a while and concentrate on trying to shift my best and brightest stories to professional markets. 

Something I hadn't anticipated was that editors might come to me - but that was exactly what began to happen.  So my decision went straight out the window.  It's one thing to choose not to submit to markets, another entirely to say no when someone actually asks you for a story!  One of those editors was Eric Guignard, who's already had plenty of mention on this blog, and another was Matt Edginton, who, looking back, I seem to have failed to talk about quite so much.

Now that Matt's first anthology The Glass Parachute is out, containing my story Final Relocation, I get to redress that a little.  I've been getting steadily more excited about TGP as it got closer, and as it became obvious just how much love and care and graphic design talent Matt was throwing at it.  All of that's reflected in the final product, a charming, professionally crafted, lavishly illustrated and all in all very characterful book.  As first attempts go, it's every bit as impressive as Eric's much-praised Dark Tales anthology earlier in the year.

The strange thing is that my working experience with both Eric and Matt ended up being pretty similar, while at the same time different from the sort of time I'd had with most other editors.  Both of them came to me with a clear idea of what they wanted to do, and even with cover art already in place; both kept me updated as their anthologies came together, worked closely with me on the edit, asked for and listened to advice, and have continued to send out updates since their collections were released.  In fact, off the top of my head, I think they both nailed every one of those ten points I wrote about in my small press blog series; anyone thinking about putting out their first anthology could learn a lot from these guys.

On a related side note, the reason my banner at the top there is a whole lot funkier, more professional and less thrown-together-in-Paint-looking as of recent weeks is that Matt was nice enough to redo it for me, by way of a thank you for Final Relocation.  Which, thinking about it, is something else I sort of talked about back in the day.  So cheers to Matt for not only putting out a small press collection I can be proud to be part of, but also for making my blogular home a much nicer place to hang my blogging hat.

New Horror Stories

As much as I like writing about big mouthed thieves and grizzly bears fighting Nazi dolphins, every so often I get the itch to try and tackle something a bit tougher and closer to the bone.

Fall From Grace was one of those stories.  It's the tale of Sarah, a volunteer aid worker who's sent out to a town in an unnamed country wracked by war and famine, and of what she discovers there.  Sarah is a basically decent person, as basically decent as most of us, anyway, but she finds herself vastly out of her depth, confronted with real horrors and real malevolence.

Fall From Grace was definitely a tough write.  I wrote it originally for an anthology titled Hell on Earth, and I took the brief perhaps too literally.  It goes to places I wasn't comfortable with visiting, and because it gives voice to a character both articulate and genuinely evil, it puts into words ideas and arguments that I'd hate for anyone to mix up with my own.  I've always figured that's one of the limbs you go out on as a writer, especially when writing horror; to talk about things that aren't supposed to be talked about, express opinions you'd never agree with in a thousand years.  Horror, after all, is supposed to kick in the doors of our comfort zones.  Still, I hesitated to send out Fall From Grace.  This was a few years ago, and I guess I was less thick-skinned about my work than now; I was worried I might be seen as trivialising the real world issues the story drew on, or reducing them to entertainment.

Anyway, I got over my doubts eventually, sent Fall From Grace out, due to the vicissitudes of publishing had it accepted not once but twice, and now, finally, it's available to read at Kaleidotrope.  After everything, it will be interesting to see what people make of it.

-O-

Prisoner of Peace was another tale that turned out difficult, on any number of levels.  It tells of a prisoner in the aftermath of a war; but the nature of that war, as well as just what is keeping the protagonist imprisoned, are revealed only slowly.  Like Fall From Grace, it draws on certain real world horrors that don't often get discussed, especially in genre fiction - and on one atrocity in particular that seems to me a peculiar blind spot for many people.  Prisoner of Peace also plays around with time, with reality and perception and memory, and tries to talk about questions like the nature of guilt and the nature of forgiveness.  Unlike most everything else I've written, it's almost wilfully obstructive; it probably defies a casual reading, and I suspect it might take a couple of runs through to fully understand.

That's perhaps the main reason it's proved such a hard sell.  I hope so, anyway, since I think Prisoner of Peace is the best horror story I've written, and I don't normally misjudge my work quite that drastically.  I was disappointed by some of the markets that turned it down, but pleased when editor Eric Guignard - whose much-acclaimed debut collection Dark Tales of Lost Civilisations I was in earlier this year - expressed an interest.  Even then, though, I dithered more than I had any right to, unsure if Eric's next anthology After Death was the right place for a story I felt so strongly about.

Now, having seen the cover art, having seen the thought and effort he's put into getting his head around and then editing and reediting Prisoner of Peace and, most recently, having seen the stunning interior artwork Eric's commissioned to accompany it, I've come to realise that it couldn't have found a more appropriate home.  After Death should be out soon, and I can't wait to see what the rest of the book look like.

Whatever You Do, Don't Do the Twist

My story A Twist Too Far is out in Andromeda Spaceways issue 56 ... which just so happens to be their special, extra big 10 year anniversary issue.  10 years!  That's a loooong time for a magazine, especially in these wacky economic climes.  So paper hats off to the ASIM collective, who've pulled off something extraordinary and deserve all the spaceship cake they can eat.

A Twist Too Far is my third story to grace the pages of Australia's finest genre magazine.  It's a little bit Lovecraftian, a little bit Conan Doyle, and maybe there's a drop of The Prestige in there too, come to think of it ... what with it being about competing contortionists and all.  Why aren't there more horror stories about contortionists?  Contortionists are scary.  I mean, not as scary as gnomes, but not so far off.  They bend their bodies into shapes that human bodies aren't supposed to bend into, for fun and profit.  How is that not ideal fodder for a horror story?  And yet I've never come across another one. So, who knows, maybe I've written the definitive contortionist horror story.  Hey, stranger things have happened, and it certainly creeps the hell out of me.

And also some other people, hopefully, since A Twist Too Far has made it onto the reading list for the HWA's Stoker awards.  Sure would be nice to get nominated for a Stoker!  In the meantime, I'm taking comfort from the fact that not only have I somehow managed to get longlisted, two anthologies I have stories in - Dark Tales of Lost Civilisations and Slices of Flesh, both from Dark Moon Books - are on there too.

Lost Civilisations Doing Well For Itself

Dark Tales: Now Kindley.

With plenty going on and absolutely nothing at a stage I can say anything useful about, I thought I'd spend one last post plugging the Dark Tales of Lost Civilisations anthology that I had a story, The Door Beyond the Water, in a couple of months back.

Firstly, because I've actually managed to read it, and enjoyed it rather a lot.  (For what it's worth, my personal favourite tales were Mark Lee Pearson's To Run a Stick Through a Fish, Jackson Kuhl's Quivira, Caw Miller's The Small Black God and Joe Lansdale's The Tall Grass, but there's plenty of other good stuff in there.)

Secondly, because I owe Eric Guignard one for helping me nail down the ending of another story, Prisoner of Peace; possibly the best horror story I've written, probably my personal favourite, and that bit better for Eric's contribution.

And thirdly, because Dark Tales has been running around like that kid in every school class whose parents feed him nothing but sugar and haven't even heard of ritalin, getting lots of attention and starting fights with the big kids and biting the dinner lady's bosom. 

What does all that mean?  I don't know, my analogy got out from under me.  What I do know is that Eric sent my an e-mail telling me lots of neat stuff.  Like ... Dark Tales is now out in e-book, here at Amazon and here at Barnes & Noble.  Like, it's been picking up nominations for a Stoker, which is pretty respectable for a small press collection from a debut editor.  Like, Goodreads are running a best horror anthology contest and it's currently at number 3, beating out some astonishingly tough competition ... not least that little Living Dead anthology thing I was in a couple of years back.  Like, it's been picking up some excellent reviews for itself. 

(And then, just as I was about to finish this post, I got a membership offer from the Horror Writers Association, who'd read The Door Beyond the Water and liked it enough to see if I'd be up for joining their gang.)

So all in all, hats off to Eric ... firstly for putting so much thought and care into creating such a strong collection, and secondly for managing to get so many of the right people to notice it.

New Fiction Out

Or should that be Old Fiction Out?

After all, The Door Beyond the Water, just out in the Dark Tales of Lost Civilisations anthology from Dark Moon Books, is a complete and utter overhaul of a story written maybe ten years ago, previously published (and read by exactly no one) in a magazine called The Willows.

I'm not going to talk about it too much about that one, though, since I'm holding out for my contributor copy and a proper look inside.  I've had a good vibe with this one from the beginning though, mainly because editor Eric Guignard's been such a treat to work with, so hey, finger's crossed.

Also out this week, though, and even older in its original version, is a story called Hand That Feeds, podcast last Sunday by Nil Desperandum.  I've gone on before about the genesis of this one, how I originally wrote it a zillion or so years ago as some kind of wacky, polemical  pit-fight of art versus the state, with art winning by a clear knockout, and then chipped and chipped away over the intervening millennia, until it was hard to say just who was right, the artist who can't help but point out how much he doesn't fit in or the bureaucrat who has to deal with him, regardless of his own feelings on the matter.  At which point I fell back in love with it a little and started sending it out - because if there's one thing I enjoy, it's writing stories that thrust big questions at the reader and then completely fail to come down on either side.

Listening to it, as wonderfully read by Scott Danielson of A Good Story is Hard to Find - who, by the way, captures the character of LeGris to a rather scary degree - I can't help but wonder at how things would have worked out if I hadn't walked away from struggling to write so-called literary fiction, abandoned the befuddling lessons of my English degrees and my weird desire to write like some impossible combination of Kafka, Dostoevsky and Conrad.  Would I be a better writer today?  Or would I be drinking absinth and eating cockroaches in a garrett flat somewhere, struggling to nail that impossible first word of that impossible first novel?  Would I be sitting here blogging about a story I wrote ten or more years ago about a misunderstood (or maybe, too-well understood) artist or would I be in some Soho coffee shop bitching about how nobody understands my art?  Are Soho coffee shops even open this late?  I mean, who drinks coffee at this time on a Sunday night?

Like the characters in Hand That Feeds, I have no answers.  But for a story I wrote whole aeons ago, I'm pretty pleased with how this one's turned out.

Best Of Necrotic Tissue Out, and Other News

I felt a real twinge when R Scott McCoy's crazy baby bit the dust.  Because although the word gets flung about a lot in genre circles, there aren't many 'zines around that are really willing to go down the pulp route, and there was something deliriously pulpy about Necrotic Tissue.  From its lurid covers to its blood-splattered interiors to the recklessly grotesque tales it filled those fourteen issues with, NT went places no one else was going.  Even just Googling it brought up  disturbing results.

I don't know that something as weird as Caretaker in the Garden of Dreams could have fit so nicely anywhere else.  And I was very glad when Scott saw fit to pick it for his Best Of Anthology ... which, if you happen to be in the market for a good horror collection, you can pick it up at Amazon here.

Also, while I remember, I discovered recently that someone's written a poem based on Zachary Hunt's fantastic illustration for Caretaker, which appeared alongside the Shadowcast podcast.  Does that count as fan fiction?  Will the fact that it doesn't stop me from pretending it does?

As for that other news... 

First up, not only has Adrian Tchaikovsky been saying nice things about Giant Thief, he's gone and written an article that takes it and Damasco as examples to talk about the changing role of the thief archetype in fantasy literature.  Which, obviously, is a subject close to my heart.  I had definite ways in mind that I wanted to make Damasco stand out from what I saw as the traditional fantasy thief ... but looking back, I wasn't necessarily basing those ideas on a whole lot.  So in a way, Adrian's article reads like the research I should have done before I started.  Now I'm going to have to go read all those other books he mentions!  Except it's probably not going to happen any time soon, because I've just started Adrian's own much-adored Shadows of the Apt series, and I'm sucked in enough that I suspect I might have to plow on till the end now.  Which is currently about five thousand pages away!

Couple more things, a bit rushed because it's way past my tea time ... the TOC is up for the Dark Tales of Lost Civilisations collection, to be published early next year by Dark Moon Books.  I've had high hopes for this one for a while now, and some of those story titles have built them up even further.

And there on the right, badly photographed on the floor of my lovely new house, is my first ARC.  When Lee told me it was going in the post, I had images of zapping Nazi's with freaky Angel of Death powers, Indy style, but it turns out ARC in this context stands for Advanced Review Copy.

Still.  Neat, huh?

Second Commission, Now With Added Brains

I mentioned a few posts back that I had my first story commission recently, when editor Eric Guignard approached me about his forthcoming Dark Tales of Lost Civilisations anthology.  In that post, I also kind of hinted at the fact that, almost straight away afterwards, I was approached by another editor with a whole 'nother request for my work.  Then I left the whole thing hanging on bit of an artificial cliffhanger, maybe striving for a sense of tension that wasn't entirely there or just bemusedly trying to draw a lengthy post to some sort of close.  Who can say?

Well ... me, obviously.  The truth is, I was being deliberately vague because, although said publisher had asked me for a contribution, they hadn't actually seen what I'd come up with.  And it was entirely possible that I'd send them my story and they'd never, ever, ever be in touch again, perhaps blocking my e-mail address just to be on the safe side.  Or else write back blaming me for the break-up of their marriage.  Or reveal that the whole thing had been some vicious and spectacularly mistimed April Fools joke.

In a pleasantly surprising fashion, none of those things have happened.  So here, belatedly, are the details I held back (or didn't know because they were about to happen in the future) in that last post.

Almost literally straight after me and Eric hashed out the last details for The Door Beyond the Water, and just after Eric let me know that the collection had been picked up by indie horror press Dark Moon Books, I got another e-mail - this one from Stan Swanson, editor and publisher at Dark Moon.  Coincidence?  Whatever the opposite is of a coincidence?  I have no idea.  All I know is, Stan was writing to know if I might be interested in putting forward a story for Dark Moon's forthcoming Slices of Flesh anthology.

You just know that's not going to be a compilation of soul-searching romantic novellas, don't you? And that's probably a good thing, because I have absolutely none of those lying around.  (Well, okay, one.  But I'm saving that for the day Mills and Boon come knocking.)  No, what Stan was after was horror flash fiction.

Only, it was a little more interesting than that.  First of all, Stan happened to mention in that initial e-mail is that he'd already picked up a bunch of very big names.  I'm not sure how many of these are meant to be public knowledge yet, so I'll hold fire on the full compendium of famousness - but even at that early point, some true celebrities of horror had thrown their hats in with Stan. Reason being?  Well, aside from the fact that horror flash fiction is a basically good thing, it probably has a lot to do with the fact that all proceeds from Slices of Flesh will be going to charity - with, the last I heard, the main beneficiary being the Literary Project of America.

But there's one more thing.  And it's a thing that would have sold me on the project all by itself.  The cover artist for this prospective anthology?  It's Mike Mignola.  Now, normally when I namecheck someone, I'd give a bit of a bio for those who've somehow missed their work.  But honestly, if you don't know who Mike Mignola is then you just plain should.  Click on the link.  Seriously.  I'm not even asking here.

Oh, and my story?  It's the (maybe a bit too) provocatively named Wetback.  It has zombies.  If you've been following my work even slightly over the last few years, you've probably noticed I have a soft spot for writing the walking dead.  I think this one's a little different though, what with the zombie being the main protagonist and all.  Not a new idea I know, but I'm still hoping this is a take that hasn't exactly been seen before.

And it's going to be behind a Mike Mignola cover.

Squee.

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? 

My First Commission. Or, Is That a Gate? No, It's Clearly a Door

Of the many neat writer things I always assumed would only happen to other people - presumably people who either were or were closely akin to Stephen King - getting a story commissioned was always pretty high on the list.  I mean, it's hard enough trying to sell one at the best of times, so the idea that someone would just come straight to me and cut all the pain and trauma out of the process was a bit like the idea of a dayjob where my boss would slap me on the back one day and say, "Hey, Dave, why don't you just stop wasting your time here and we'll just pay you for sucking up air?"  And, you know, it not just be a sarcastic way of firing me.

So you can imagine how I was coloured the exact colour of surprised when writer / editor-to-be Eric Guignard dropped me a very polite e-mail to say that he'd enjoyed Stockholm Syndrome in the Living Dead anthology, and was there any chance that I might be able to put something together for his forthcoming collection Dark Tales of Lost Civilisations?  Not only a comission, but a polite and complimentary comission to an anthology with the kind of title that would make my fingers get itchy just thinking about it!  I mean, dark Tales?  Lost civilisations?  That's got to mean Lovecraftian goings-on in abandoned, antedeluvian burgs, exactly the kind of stuff I write about with no incentive whatsoever.  I doesn't take much imagination to guess what my answer was.

I said no.

Well, I kind of did.  Actually, what I said was, "I'm completely snowed under with writing my new novel and a kerzillion other things and sadly the hopes of me being able to write a new story in time are roughly equivalent to the hopes of hell getting its own all-star ice hockey team.  But I do have this very nice (though already slightly published) story that I think would be a heck of good fit.  It's called The Gate in the Jungle and it's been read by precisely seven people, including the editor and my mum.  How's about I polish that up?"

A relatively logical solution, I hope you'll agree.  Only problem was, Eric was in the midst of trying to find a publisher for his burgeoning anthology, and one of the selling points was that it was a collection of all-new fiction.  However, he did really like Gate.  How much polishing was I talking about exactly, he asked?  Could it be sufficient polishing that the end result might reasonably be considered a fresh story?  Were we looking at the kind of polish that could warrant a new title here?

I thought it over.  And that time, I said yes.

The end result is The Door Beyond the Lake.  Is it a polish?  A rewrite?  A new story?  I'm hopeful it's a bit of all of those.  I know I put a lot of man-hours into it, and was more pleased than I'd hoped I could be with the results - something kind of like a story I wrote many years ago, except far better and much creepier and - well, new.  Maybe more importantly, Eric feels the same, meaning that The Door Beyond the Lake is now forthcoming in Dark Tales of Lost Civilisations.  And while I was labouring away on my "reimagining", Eric was busy finding a publisher, in the shape of Dark Moon Books.  Who are planning to premier it at next year's Horrorcon.  So that worked out pretty well, all told.

And then, a couple of days later, I got my second ever commission.  But it's probably a little too early to talk about that one.