Short Story News June 2018

Here's a post I've been holding off on for a while now, I guess because bad news only becomes actual bad news at the point when you share it.  Or at least because I've kept hoping that the horrendous dry spell I've been going through these last couple of years on the short fiction sales front might finally come to an end, and then I could spread a little good news instead.

To put that in perspective: since January 2017, I've literally sold more original novels than I have original short stories!  And honestly, this bites.  I mean, not the novel-selling part, that's great news.  But I know with utter conviction that I'm sending out some of the best short fiction I've written - indeed, maybe the best work I've written full stop - and the creeping certainty that some of it might never see the light of day is pretty gutting.  But what can you do?  Only give up or try that bit harder, and I'm not giving up yet.  So I've been submitting with all the energy I can muster, and more importantly, making a concerted effort to edit the remainder of the work I've got sitting about at first draft stage.  Because maybe something in that lot might fare better, right?

With that grumble out of the way, I have to admit that things could be worse.  At least I'm still selling the odd reprint, and at least I've landed them in a couple of really exciting markets.  The nicest surprise was when I was approached by the editor of Nowa Fantastyka to see if they could buy my story Jenny's Sick for translation into Polish.  Now that it's out, I'm probably safe to admit that I'd have likely let them have it for free; my family immigrated from Poland a generation or three back and it was extremely cool to have that link to what my dad jokingly refers to as "the old country."  Plus, Nowa Fantastyka is an utterly wonderful magazine.  I mean, I can barely read a word of it, but the presentation is fantastic, and the illustration for Jenny's Sick - rather, Jenny Choruje - is one of the very nicest I've had.

But family heritage issues aside, the bigger news is surely making it into a third of Flame Tree Publishing's utterly gorgeous gothic fiction anthologies (after Science Fiction and Lost Worlds).  This one's titled Lost Souls, and the story, Casualty of Peace, is one of my personal favourites, which I'm really pleased to be getting to yet more readers after its appearance in Eric Guignard's excellent Horror Library Volume 6 collection.  It's one of those rare tales that turned out just the way I intended, after a gestation period of months or maybe even years, and I'll be thrilled to see it between lavishly engraved hardback covers.  I'm not sure of a release date on that yet, but I'd guess it'll be towards the back end of the year; in the meantime, there's a full table of contents here.

And, thank goodness, there's always Digital Fiction Publishing!  I've already had one story out with them this year - Twitcher, in the Heinous Concoction horror anthology released back in February - and I've a couple more pending.  Again on the horror front, Great Black Wave will be coming up at some point, as will another personal favourite, my science-fiction tale of well-intentioned alien oppressors Free Radical.

Last up, I guess I should admit that there are one or two other things on the horizon, and those are original pieces.  But I don't know that I'm meant to be talking about them yet, so I won't.  Still, I do sincerely hope that things turn around before this year is out, because the way it's going, it's getting increasingly untenable to keep pouring time into writing and trying to sell short fiction - and it would break my heart to give it up.  So on that front as on every other, here's to the second half of 2018 sucking less than the first has!

Short Story News, May 2017

Not for the first time, I've been lax in keeping up with my short story news, and not for the first time that means I now have a couple of posts' worth that I'm going to have to cram into just the one.  And as usual, the reason was that I felt as though not a lot was happening until I suddenly realized that it had been and I'd just been distracted!

Anyway, let's go for the new stories first.  Casualty of Peace marks my third collaboration with award-winning editor Eric Guignard; Eric got in touch to let me know he was resuscitating the long-running Horror Library anthology series, and did I have anything that might be a good fit?  The story we settled on is something of a companion to the last one Eric bought from me, Prisoner of Peace, and came out of the World War One research that occupied so much of my first year of full-time writing.  The question I found myself asking was, what must it have been like for those wives and mothers on the home front in the latter years of the war, who'd seen so many men return mentally or physically damaged beyond all repair?  Did they hope that their menfolk would be somehow exempted?  Or did they begin to secretly dread their return?  The result, like Prisoner of Peace, is a ghost story of sorts, an extended metaphor and a puzzle with no real answer, except perhaps that war spares no-one.  You can find it in Horror Library volume six.

I feel like I've mentioned my golem sex story quite a few times here, but perhaps that's just because I like typing the phrase "golem sex story."  And perhaps I'm not doing Feet of Clay, Mind of Coal justice by focusing on one particular, brief scene in what's actually an (admittedly rather weird) love story with a background in the folklore research I drifted into for my MA dissertation.  At any rate, of everything here, the third in Pantheon Magazine's Gaia anthology series is the only book I've actually found time to read, and it was just as good as volume two, which I enjoyed a great deal.  You can grab a copy here.

My second sale to the impossibly long-running Space and Time was another older story.  I can't even remember exactly how long ago I wrote Children of Deadways, except that it came towards the end of a period when I produced a lot of work I'm particularly happy with.  I was experimenting with the possibilities of going all-in on world building, and this is maybe the culmination of that trend, an elaborately Gothic dark fantasy with a setting I could probably have squeezed a whole novel out of.  You can grab a copy of issue 128 from the Space and Time website, and it comes highly recommended; there are reasons this magazine has managed to stick around for half a century.


Lastly for the new stuff, my most recent sale turned out also to be the most recent thing to come out: Now That All the Heroes are Dead was picked up by Read Short Fiction not even a month ago and, as of the start of May, it's up to read on the site.  I wrote this one for an open anthology call asking for Lovecraftian heroic fantasy fiction and, between you and me and in my greatly biased opinion, I still think they were dumbasses not to take it!  I had great fun distilling all my favourite weird fiction into one twisted little tale, and there's even a bit of subtext in there, thanks again to all that World War One reading.  It's pretty short, too, so why not give it a read?

On the reprints side, the most exciting news is perhaps that the editors at Pseudopod got in touch to ask if they could anthologize my story Stockholm Syndrome as part of their 10th anniversary celebrations.  Obviously I said yes, but I also took the opportunity to polish up a story that, frankly, has long since stopped owing me any favours; between Pseudopod itself and the hugely successful The Living Dead anthology, this has to be the most widely read (and listened to) short story I've written.  You can find the improved new version in the For Mortal Things Unsung anthology - which, given that it was primarily an incentive for a Kickstarter campaign, isn't that widely available, but can be grabbed from Smashwords, among other places.

Meanwhile, it will surprise no-one that I've had a couple more stories out with Digital Fiction Publishing.  As well as appearing in their own adorable individual e-books, Passive Resistance can be found in the Operative Sequence science-fiction collection and Rindelstein's Monsters appears in the Digital Fantasy Fiction book Casual Conjurings - which, by slightly awkward coincidence, I also did some of the slush-reading for.  Fortunately Rindelstein's Monsters got picked up well before I started, so at least I can't be accused of being one of tham thar nepotists, and the plus side is that, even having not seen a copy yet, I can confirm that there's some cracking fiction inside.

Last up - since I can't talk yet about the highly exciting reprint sale I snagged a few weeks ago! - I have a couple more pieces in Great Jones Street, namely my two stories following master assassin Otranto Osario through the mean streets of Cold Harbour, Ill-Met at Midnight and A Killer of Dead Men.  If you're at interested in short fiction then you really need to be paying attention to Great Jones Street, their app is free to download and is absolutely stuffed with great work from some of the biggest names in the industry (and, er, me.)

Anyway, that'll do for the moment.  As I vaguely remember predicting, the sales have slowed down this year - in fact, until April they'd dried up altogether - so I don't actually have that much left to come out.  But what there is is pretty exciting, so hopefully I'll have enough material to justify another one of these posts before too long.

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.

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.

Prisoner of Peace up at Pseudopod

I should probably be saying something about Nine Worlds here, but I'm still recovering, so let's come back to that one when my Con fatigue has settled down and instead I'll mention my short horror story Prisoner of Peace, which went up in podcast at Pseudopod on Friday.

There was a very good reason that it went live on that particular date, the 9th of August; it's the anniversary of the US Atomic bombing of the Japanese city of Nagasaki, an event which - without giving too much away - Prisoner of Peace is greatly informed by.  It's a subject that I have strong feelings about, a subject that it should be impossible not to have strong feelings about, and I hope I've done it some sort of justice, in however small a way.

Every time I've gone back to Prisoner, I've been surprised by how much effect it has on me: how much it creeps me out, and how wrenching I find certain scenes.  Listening to Caith Donovan's reading last night with the lights off didn't make things any better.  Caith does a great job in bringing out both the horror and the sadness of the story, and nailing the many points where the two entwine.  I'm grateful too to Al Stuart for his astute endtro, giving his own thoughts on the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings and their repercussions and explicitly discussing a lot that I could only nudge at in the story.

While we're on the subject, I should mention again that Prisoner is also available in Eric Guignard's terrific After Death anthology.  It's one of the best, most unusual, most lavishly illustrated anthologies I've been lucky enough to be a part of, and plenty more people should be reading it.

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.

New Sales: Pseudopod and Beneath Ceaseless Skies

It's been a surprisingly good few weeks for short fiction sales, especially given that I haven't had a whole load of time to send stuff out lately, what with all the work on Prince Thief and Endangered Weapon and, oh, that day job thing I try not to think about.

First up recently came Pseudopod, taking my short story Prisoner of Peace - also recently accepted for Eric Guignard's very-likely-to-be-wonderful After Death anthology - and, due to some scheduling mix-ups and my usual confusion, leading to me tying myself in knots over whether a story that had been accepted but not printed could actually be called a reprint.  Fortunately it can, since After Death comes out in March / April time and Pseudopod are planning to run Prisoner on the anniversary of the Nagasaki bombing, for reasons that I can't explain without giving the whole thing away.*

Then, soon after, Beneath Ceaseless Skies editor Scott Andrews expressed interest in my Leiber-pastichingly-titled tale Ill-Met At Midnight**, with some reservations ... he wasn't entirely sold on the ending and asked me to make a few changes.  I duly went back to it, while sitting in the roof garden of our hotel in Marrakesh on a sunny December afternoon - one of the most pleasant bits of writing I've ever done.  And it did the trick!

Clearly, there's a moral here.  I now know where I've been going wrong all these years, and it has everything to do with not writing everything in beautifully sunny North African locations.  Expect this to be redressed the very moment I make enough money to emigrate...





* In fact, come to think of it, running it on the anniversary of Nagasaki already gives the game away a bit.  But it's also very appropriate, so I think it's probably okay.

** Which I recently read aloud at Fantasycon 2012, if you happen to be one of the nine people who was there.

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.

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.

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.

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.