Short Story News, September 2017

Well, it has to be said that 2017 is turning into a horrible year for short story sales, which is frustrating to say the least, if only because I'm pretty sure that I'm sending out some of the best fiction I've ever written.  But the compensation is that, for the moment at least, I still have stuff coming out in some very cool venues.

Taking things in reverse order, May saw my somewhat Lovecraftian, somewhat Howardesque sword and sorcery story Now That All the Heroes Are Dead come out from Read Short Fiction.  It's a thoroughly screwed-up tale, if I do say so, with a lot of subtext about who generally ends up doing the dirty work and why, in fantasy worlds or elsewhere; I guess the clue's at least partly there in the title.  Anyway, it's fairly short and it's free to read, so why not take a look?  And if you never quite trust traditional sword and sorcery stories afterwards then don't blame me, they were never that trustworthy in the first place.

Next we have my only comics work of the year, and something that's been slowly coalescing for absolutely years, mine and my C21st Gods co-creator Anthony Summey's short strip Conservationists in this year's Futurequake anthology.  I've already talked about this one quite a bit, so I'll just add that as of last month it's available on Comixology at a really reasonable price - see here - and that I was hugely pleased to come across a review that singled Conservationists out.  I was convinced no-one would get this one, what with dialogue-free alien invasion stories with animals as protagonists not exactly being a major subgenre, so it's nice that at least one reader responded to what Anthony and I cooked up.

(Speaking of reviews: there have been a few for Horror Library volume 6, but the only one I managed to keep a note of was this one, for reasons that will become apparent if you read it.  All right, yeah, the reviewer picks Casualty of Peace as their favourite story in the collection.  But it's also a really thorough review, so there.)


July also saw my personal highlight for this year on the short fiction front, my second appearance in a Flame Tree Publishing anthology.  I can't stress how stupidly gorgeous these are!  I suspect my biggest regret when I die will be that I didn't somehow figure out a way to wrangle a story into every single one of them, because they're some of the nicest books I've ever seen; at any rate, to be in not one but two of them has been a huge thrill.  This time around, it's The Sign in the Moonlight - lead story of the eponymous short story collection - in their Lost Worlds collection, and I'm up against such vaguely prestigious sorts as Arthur Conan Doyle, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Rudyard Kipling and H. Rider Haggard.  Oh, and those Howard and Lovecraft blokes I plugged earlier.  Seriously though, these books are absolutely fantastic, and if you're into classic genre fiction then you owe it to yourself to track them down.

Which brings us up to the present day, and the podcasting of my flash horror piece My Friend Fishfinger by Daisy Aged 7 at 

YA market Cast of Wonders.  As much as I was ever so slightly disappointed that they didn't manage to find an actual seven year old girl to read it, I'm happy to settle for Head Editor Marguerite Kenner's take; as I pointed out to her afterwards, I know how hard it is to read this grammatically challenged little story out loud, and Marguerite does a fine job.  You can hear it here.

Lastly, I have a couple more stories pending at what's basically my authorial home now, Digital Fiction Publishing - those being Twitcher on the horror front, first published in Pseudopod, and SF story Free Radical, which appeared in the Second Contacts anthology a year or two back.  Sad to say, with me now slush-reading on both the fantasy and science-fiction sides, I've had to bar myself from submitting due to the blatant conflict of interest!  Still, it's been a heck of a run, and I'm really proud to have so much work with what's become, out of nowhere, the most consistently excellent reprint market around.  And yeah, I'm horrendously biased, but that doesn't make it any the less true.

The Future is Futurequake

I'm getting a bit bored of mainstream comics lately.  In fact, I feel like mainstream comics are getting bored of mainstream comics; what other reason could there be for the endless reboots and reimaginings and re-whatever-the-hell-else's?  And for the first time since when I first got into comics way back when, it feels like all of the interesting stuff is happening elsewhere.  I mean, would anyone seriously argue these days that Marvel or DC are putting out better books than, say, Image?  Well, perhaps, but they'd be wrong.

In other news, the UK still has a comics industry.  Okay, maybe not an industry, but it still has more than enough talented creators to support one; all that's lacking is the publishers and the readership.  As far as I can judge, there's 2000AD and then there's Futurequake, and honestly, in my experience, your chances are a great deal better of getting published in the latter.  But you know what, that's okay, because Futurequake is seriously impressive in its own right, and has grown all the more so since I last had work in there a few years back.  It's a proper indy comic that looks as good as just about anything out there, and it's a hundred pages long, which makes for a particularly cheap graphic novel in this day and age.  And those pages are packed full of quirky, original work of the sort that's becoming so vanishingly rare in the world of comic books.

For example: Conservationists.  The first draft of my script dates back a heck of a way, and was one of those nonsensical ideas I never know when to let go of.  The short version is, what would an alien invasion look like from a nonhuman perspective?  In this case, the nonhuman is an urban fox just trying to get by, and in my original draft the invasion was very much background detail; after all, what would a fox give a damn?

Dave Evans, Futurequake head honcho, liked the notion but wanted to see a bit more action, and then Anthony Summey - who'd soon after because my co-conspirator on C21st Gods - was heavily into the alien designs and the violent, explodey stuff, and the end result was not a great deal like what I originally had in mind.  Which, lest it sound like I'm complaining, is undoubtedly a good thing.  What Anthony, and to a lesser extent Dave, nudged this little story towards being is a heck of a lot more fun than what I first envisaged, while still maintaining that core concept of how the alien annihilation of humankind would seem like much, much less of a big deal if you're weren't a human.

Should you be up for reading it, along with lots of other stories by a whole load of talented writers and artists, you can grab a copy of Futurequake 2017 from their website; it should be available by the time I post this or very soon after.

Short Fiction News, Mid-2014

I'm currently on the train back from Nine Worlds, which was for the most part a lot of fun, but which I'm at this precise moment too tired, hungover, and not-quite-sure-of-exactly-what-I-thought to try and blog about.  So here's one I prepared earlier...

I remember writing quite a grumbly post when I got my first short story acceptance of 2014, that being Twitcher to the fine folks at Pseudopod, thanks to the fact that it came in goddamn May and four and a bit months is a fair while to go without a sale.  (In fact it had been quite a bit more than that because the tail end of 2013 hadn't been exactly brilliant either.)  Well, it's August now and I'm grumbling substantially less.  In fact if things were to keep on like the last couple of months then I'd be happy indeed ... which of course they probably won't, so I'd better get my positivism in while I can:

- First up I sold Twilight For the Nightingale, the story I'd been unhelpfully referring to as my homoerotic supervillain story, to Resurrection House's forthcoming XIII anthology.  I'm hopeful that this will be one of those rare perfect pairings of story and market, because it sounds like it's going to be a terrifically bonkers book.  I mean, you know when editors normally say they want something a bit like Neil Gaiman or whatever?  Mark Teppo name-checked Kafka, Gene Wolfe, Darren Aronofsky and David Lynch.  I'm really looking forward to getting my hands on this one.

- Out of the blue I got some good news, not to mention a little unexpected cash, when Kat Rocha of 01 Publishing got in touch to say that the previously e-book only Whispers From the Abyss collection, which includes my My Friend Fishfinger By Daisy, Age 7, had done well enough to warrant a print edition.  As I've noted before now, this was a terrific little collection and deserves to do well.  I've since discovered that 01 have run a Kickstarter for the project, which has finished now but remains well worth checking out for its fantastic trailer.  If I wasn't due two copies as a contributor then I suspect this would have been the first Kickstarter I got actively involved with, because I want me a Star Spawn poster something bad.

- Soon after that I got my quickest ever acceptance, when relatively new outfit Eldritch Press got back to me within four hours to say that they'd like to take my story Br(other) for their upcoming Our World of Horror anthology.  I genuinely assumed this was some sort of mistake until the contract came through, because four hours.  That's barely even a real amount of time.  I mean, I've spent that long in the shower before now.  Anyway, if the cover art is anything to go by then this one is going by both great and seriously warped. 

- I realised that I might as well send one of the short comic scripts I've been sitting on for years to Futurequake, who published a couple of my early efforts in that department a few years back.  The one I opted for was a story called Conservationists,which I'm hopeful may be the only occasion of anyone telling an alien invasion story through the eyes of an urban fox.  It's a frankly insane, completely dialogue-free bit of work, and I can't wait to see what an artist makes of it.

- Last but not least, and unusually up to the minute in that I only found out three hours ago, but Jonathan Green, official Nicest Man in Fantasy (and yet, paradoxically, the world's meanest Just a Minute player), let me know that he'll be using my The Shark in the Heart for his forthcoming-next-year-from-Snow Books anthology Sharkpunk. 

Because yes, apparently, now that's a thing.

So there we go.  I'm still way behind on my target for this year, which should theoretically be going really well due to all the additional time I have and in fact is going worse than last year, when I had hardly any time at all.  But a couple of good months surely does take the edge off, and who knows?  There may yet come another surge of goodnewsery before the year is out.

The Ineffectual Unleashed

Many and odd are the roads a story can take from weird little idea throbbing at the back of your brain to full-on published goodness.

The Unleashing of the Ineffectual began life as a short story about four years ago.  The idea - of a bunch of teenage Lovecraft groupies trying to summon something the master might have been proud of and getting less than they bargained for - was definitely fun, but it just didn't work the way I first wrote it.  I sent it out a couple of times and realised it didn't have much of a future.  But I still liked the concept, I just felt like I'd slipped up on the execution.

Some time after that I was looking around for an idea for a follow-up comic script to my first attempt, Fleshworld, as published in Futurequake #10.  It occurred to me that the problem with Unleashing was that it needed too much exposition to get it moving. That isn't so much of an issue in a comic, you just write instructions like "It’s a surreal landscape, with an extra sun or two, huge distorted trees, strange crystalline towers, and vast mountains in the background" and shift the problem onto your poor artist.  So I hacked Unleashing up, turned exposition into panel notes, and sent it to the Futurequake guys, who also happen to publish a horror comic imprint by the name of Something Wicked.

 This time it got accepted straight away, and the artist who got landed with the unenviable task of interpreting those instructions was none other than the phenomenally talented Duncan Kay. I try not to throw around phrases like 'phenomenally talented' too much, so to put that in context, I now have two pieces of Duncan's work framed and sitting on the bookshelves in my study.  Not only is Duncan a fine artist, he was a spot-on choice for this particular story, and I really couldn't have got much luckier.

Anyway, things went from there.  Duncan and I got the comic strip version of Unleashing finished a little over a year ago, for the 2009 issue of Something Wicked, and then for behind-the-scenes reasons it didn't appear in that issue - at which point, what with having the memory of a confused marsupial, I mostly forgot about it.  But now, finally, it's out, and I should soon have my contributor copy.  In the meantime, there's the entirely neat cover in the top-left - and the full TOC can be found here.

October Wrap Up

Just a quick post to report a few belated odds and sods of October news:

Well, the month was a bit of a triumph, all told, with a couple of very strong sales and three acceptances for non-paying but fun venues. Of the latter, and not to denigrate the other two, I'm currently most excited about the picking up of my comic strip for Mangaquake, since I've just finished the new edit. It's now called Endangered Weapon B, after its grizzly-bear-in-robot-armour hero Banjo, and it comes in at ten pages, twice as long as Fleshworld (as printed in Futurequake #10) or my forthcoming strip in Something Wicked. It's been fun to decompress the story, and I think that this is the definite high point of (my admittedly limited!) comics work so far. In short, I'm chuffed with it, and can't wait to see what an artist makes of those ten pages of utter dementedness.

I'd hoped to have a couple of things out this month, but neither has materialised; on the plus side, the anthology from Comet Press that's to feature my Rindelstein's Monsters now has a fantastic cover, a neat webpage all of its own, a release date at the back end of November, and perhaps most importantly, a name - The Death Panel. I've seen a copy of the galley, and I can say with only a hint of bias that this one is going to be awesome.

Last up, I found yet another review of The Living Dead, which is both staggeringly thorough and singles out Stockholm Syndrome for credit - in the shape of a 4 out of 5 rating. At least, I hope it's out of five, and not say, seventy-three. Either way, cheers to reviewer Gregory Tidwell.