Some Short Story Acceptances for 2011, All at Once

Not that I've any right to moan, what with the book deal and all, but it's been a rubbish few months for short fiction sales.  And not just rubbish but shockingly and confusingly rubbish, since asides from a couple of random slow patches, I was shifting work on a fairly regular basis for quite a while there.  Since July of last year, however, I've sold one tale - and that was to the now defunct Northern Frights Fallen anthology.  When you've got, on average, twenty pieces out at any given time, that's not such a great track record.

Well now I really haven't got any right to moan.

The good news started with new pro-rate market Digital Science Fiction picking up my story Black Sun, a bleak and vicious bit of Lovecraftian sci-fi / horror.  Actually, I say Lovecraftian, because that was the obvious jumping off point, but the biggest influence on this one was M. John Harrison - an undeniably great writer who blows me away and irritates the hell out of me by turns.  Black Sun was basically, "What if M. John Harrison wrote a Lovecraftian sci-fi horror story and left at home all the bits of his style that really wind me up, and then what if instead of it being M. John Harrison it was actually me?"

Now, obviously I'm no more capable of writing as well as M. John Harrison as I am of writing as well as H. P. Lovecraft - and less obviously, I don't think anyone would even realise I'd tried if I didn't tell them.  Still, it was worth a go, and I'm plenty happy with the results, even if they only read like David Tallerman.

Anyway.  It's always a bit dicey taking a chance on a new market, pro-rate or no.  But I've been stupidly lucky on this front in the past, what with Flash Fiction Online, Lightspeed and Bull Spec all picking up my work when they were barely out of diapers, and everything I've seen of Digital Science Fiction makes me think they'll be around for a long time to come.  They've been brilliantly professional in their dealings with me, and the developments on their website suggest they're putting together a quality product that'll make the world of sci-fi a wee bit more sexy and exciting.

Just as I was calming down from that one, I got another e-mail to say that Shadowcast are going to produce my story Caretaker in the Garden of Dreams, as previously published in the recently closed print magazine Necrotic Tissue.  And that was great, because I like Shadowcast, I always get a bit giddy about having stuff podcast, and it's nice to have things out in a format people can access for free, because it's not like anyone's got any money these days.

Then - and this was the point where it all got a bit silly - I got another e-mail from R. Scott McCoy, former editor of Necrotic Tissue, to say he's putting together a best-of anthology and would I be okay with Caretaker being a part of it?  Having never been in a best-of anything before, it's probably not even worth pointing out that I said yes.  And then maybe did a little dance in my writing chair.

So maybe where I've been going wrong for ten months is trying to sell any story other than Caretaker in the Garden of Dreams?  It's a lesson learned, all right.

Fallen Antho Canned as Northern Frights Goes On Hiatus

I suppose it was inevitable that with some of the good news I've been posting lately on the writing front - and the even better news I hope to be letting out of the bag very soon - there was bound to be something really rubbish lurking round the corner.

And lo, it arrived on Friday night, in the form of an e-mail from Northern Frights Publishing editor JW Schnarr telling me that, for undisclosed personal reasons, NFP it going on hiatus, the forthcoming Fallen anthology won't see the light of day, and my story Fall From Grace is back out in the cold.

I'd try to be all philosophical about it but frankly, given my desperate lack of short fiction sales over the last few months and the tenuous states of the tiny handful of publications I've still got on the way, this was a blow - all the more so because I was hugely looking forward to this one.  The three books NFP put out in its brief life were all beautifully designed and well received, and I've not doubt that both of those things would have been equally true of Fallen. 

I wrote to Mr Schnarr asking if he could see any way around this, since he suggested he plans to consolidate NFP at some point in the future.  Personally, give how astonishingly hard it can be to find a really good home for a story, I'd rather give an editor a few months leeway than try to resell it elsewhere.  But I haven't received a reply, and perhaps, in the face of whatever crisis was significant enough for him to put to bed such an obvious labour of love, it was naive to expect one.  However it works out, I hope this isn't the end of Northern Frights.  There aren't enough, and will never be enough, great small press publishers out there.


On a more positive and completely unrelated note ... I only had to mention that I'd written a wombot into the new Endangered Weapon script and Bob Molesworth sent me a sketch of one.  How neat is that?

Fallen From Grace

Last Monday was a good day.

I got out of work early to find some seriously unseasonal sunshine waiting for me, and decided that rather than waste it, I'd head out into the countryside.  I've been doing a lot of this since I moved to Cheltenham, since I've got the Cotswolds on my doorstep and the Cotswolds are one of the most downright beautiful parts of the country I've ever come across.  But this was the first time I'd ventured out on the spur of the moment.  Luckily, I knew a short walk within reasonable biking distance, and had just enough daylight left to get there, get round and make it home again.

An hour later I was standing on the hillside above Cheltenham, looking down over the city and for miles past it, the sun beating down, a little knackered from the bike ride and the hike up there but still feeling pretty great - when my phone gave its little 'new e-mail' warble.  More spam?  Amazon trying to sell me a ton of stuff I didn't want?  Nope, it was Northern Frights Publishing, writing to tell me that my story Fall From Grace had been accepted for their forthcoming collection Fallen: An Anthology of Demonic Horror.

I've had my fingers crossed for ages on this one - because NFP have been putting out some really imaginative, exciting and stunningly designed books, and because Fall From Grace is so dark and fundamentally twisted that I wasn't sure anyone would ever agree to publish it.

So ... like I said, a good day.