Glass Houses out in Theaker's #34

Hot on the tail of last week's publication in Encounters, I've just discovered that I've another story out - and sticking with the theme of the month, it's another shortish, slightly mad sci-fi tale.  Only this one is called Glass Houses, and the magazine is the always delectable Theaker's Quarterly Fiction.

I've made no secret of my fondness for Mr Theaker's eccentric magazine baby, it's odd as all hell and a labour of love in the best possible way.  One of the things I really admire about it is that each issue is a noticable step forward from the last, and issue 34 is no exception. For once, I've actually managed to get my hands on a copy before blogging about it, and it's definitely the finest TQF I've seen. 

First up, the cover is by Howard Watts, another TQF regular whose art - despite a knee-jerk resitance I have to computer generated imagery - I've come to seriously like.  Isn't it neat how that building in the background looks just like the Statue of Liberty until you actually concentrate on it?  The details in Howard's work - like those banks of poor, exposed trees - hint at whole cultures, whole worlds even, just waiting beyond the edges of the image, which has always been one of my favourite qualities in genre art.

Inside, you have a whole ton of fiction - including what might possibly (but hopefully won't be) the last published story by my semi-retired author friend Rafe McGregor - a quite staggering number of reviews, and a fair amount of editorial content from the always entertaining Mr Theaker himself.  At 156 pages, it's a particularly colossal issue.  And, all else aside, (and not counting the milliseconds of life it takes to download a copy), it's completely and utterly free.

Some Theories out in Encounters #4

I just got word that the new issue of Encounters is out from Black Matrix Publishing, with my story Some Theories Regarding the Current Crisis nestled somewhere in its nether-pages.

Normally at this point I'd say that I can't actually comment on the magazine because I haven't seen a print copy, and while that second bit is true - I believe it literally just came out today - the first bit isn't.  That's because Black Matrix make canny use of some neat technology to let readers sample the first few pages on their site.  (This tool, by the way, is something I've seen nowhere else, and I'm bewildered that more magazines haven't adopted it.)  So I can say with confidence that Encounters is one of the best-presented small press 'zines out there, with an emphasis on clarity and readability (something else I'm often puzzled by the lack of, even in the professional publishing world) and some nice, eye-catching artwork.  I was also impressed by Guy Kenyon's editorial, the gist of which is that he wants to put out a magazine full of good fiction and get it read by as many people as possible.  Needless to say, that's pretty much exactly what I want to hear from an editor who publishes my work.

Of course, these are all things that Guy's been getting right since day one, and pretty much the reasons I submitted to him in the first place.  I've mentioned many of them before, but I figure they warrant repeating - one of the reasons why being a discussion that I touch on at the end of this post.

Before that, though, a few notes about Some Theories Regarding the Current Crisis.  I've mentioned the gist before, I believe, (think atmosphere-driven sci-fi with an emphasis on spooky weirdness), but it occurred to me a few days again that I've never credited Alasdair Stuart's considerable input.  Some Theories was actually written for a planned shared-world antho that Al was cooking up with the York writing group he hosts, and much of the background (as well as a fair share of the weird) is his contribution.  After I left York I rewrote it to help it stand on its own two snow-shoe'd feet, and of course I'm far too mean to consider giving Al a co-author credit or anything like that, so I'll settle for pointing out what an excellent writer (and human being) he is, that he has more good ideas in the tip of his pinky than I do in my whole damn head, and that some of them went towards making Some Theories what it is today.

That being, spookily weird.  I said that, right?


Lastly, something that readers may possibly find interesting: In the early days of Black Matrix Press, author John Scalzi wrote a blog post castigating them for their low pay rates and Guy Kenyon responded on his own blog.  This is a subject that I've written on quite extensively myself here, and one I find both interesting and under-discussed within the industry.  I've been thinking a lot about the small press lately, and what I'd like to see it doing in a perfect world, and I plan to put some of those thoughts down here when I get a spare few minutes.  In the meantime, I find John and Guy's comments interesting because they sum up so well the fors and againsts of what Duotrope's Digest calls token-paying markets.

Some Theories Regarding Monsters, and Other News

A couple of bits of good news to enliven what so far has been a slow and somewhat agonising month on the writing front:

First up, I'm pleased to announce that Encounters magazine, from recent upstart press Black Matrix Publishing, will be including my story Some Theories Regarding the Current Crisis.  Some Theories is a short science-fiction tale, which I wrote a couple of years back for an anthology that (so far as I know) never saw the light of the day.  Since I'm still catching up with myself on the editing and sending stuff out front, that makes it one of the most recent of my stories to appear.  That period of the end of 2007, beginning of 2008 was when it first started to really feel like I was finding my feet, so it's great to see this stuff beginning to get out into the world.

In other, really belated news, I mentioned a while back that my poem Doppelganger - as published in Chiaroscuro webzine - received an honourable mention for anthologist-extraordinaire Ellen Datlow's annual horror best-of anthology in 2008.  What totally passed me by was that my story Rindelstein's Monsters (from the Comet Press Death Panel antho) got a nod too, for the 2009 edition.  Pretty neat that, and I fully intend to actually get into one of this things, by 2027 at the absolute latest.

Finally, if anyone's been paying attention they might have noticed that my novel wordometer doohickey has been mutating.  The good news is, I've finally broken my 100'000 word target; the bad news - you guessed it - is that there's still a ways to go.  Funland is raging out of control, and the focus now is on finishing it before it tries to take over the world or eat my brains.  I'm hopeful for getting it knocked on the head by close of play on Wednesday.  Frankly, if it isn't done by the end of the week then I might just stop.  Endings are overrated, right?