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

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

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

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

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

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

Short Story News - May 2021

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

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

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

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

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