Short Story News November 2018

I was grumbling back in June about what a dreadful year this was turning out to be for short fiction sales, and as I was planning this post I was concerned the point would be that things really haven't picked up at all.  But what do you know?  Thankfully a last-minute twist has pushed the back end of 2018 from okay to actually pretty good!

And to be honest, even without that, a handful of really brilliant events had already gone a long way toward turning the year around.  If there was nothing else, I'd still be thrilled to have The Only Way Out Lies Farther In in top horror 'zine The Dark, a market I never thought I'd crack until I suddenly somehow did.  This one's a deeply personal story in which nothing is based directly on my life - which is to say that I poured a lot of me in there and every last drop got squeezed out of its original shape, leaving a tale that's at the same time almost entirely autobiographical and totally fictitious.  As such, it's personally one of the most frightening things I've written, which makes it tricky to guess what effect it's likely to have on others.  Fortunately, the one review I've seen suggests that it's quite capable of getting under somebody else's skin as well.

And speaking of recent horror fiction I feel really good about, Casualty of Peace, a ghost story that's actually more a meditation on the psychological traumas of the home front experience in the world wars - fun, right! - has been out for a second time in another of Flame Tree Publishing's utterly gorgeous anthologies, this one titled Lost Souls, which couldn't be more appropriate for that particular tale.  It also came to the notice of Best Horror of the Year anthologist Ellen Datlow, getting me another honourable mention, which was pretty cool in an "Ever the bridesmaid" sort of way.  At any rate, it's brilliant that a lot more people will be reading a piece I'm seriously proud of.

And here I am, still not having mentioned the absolutely best thing, or at any rate the one that's likely to stay with me when I'm old and grey and trying to make some sense of what this whole writing lark was about.  I've been a huge fan of Adrian Tchaikovsky's Shadows of the Apt series ever since I picked up the first volume, thinking I was doing him a favour for kindly blurbing Giant Thief, and got helplessly hooked to the intricate, outlandish, original world he'd built.  So when Adrian asked if I wanted to play around there, the answer was self-evident.  And funnily enough, the tale I wanted to tell was too: there was a question that had been bugging me - er, pun genuinely not intended! - for a fair old while, and a character whose back story I was desperate to know, and I got to put the two together and craft a tiny chunk of actual Apt lore.  Seriously, there's a minor character in that series that now has a history created entirely by me, and that's about the single awesomest thing that's happened since I began this madness over a decade ago.  If you want to know who and what, or even if you don't, I highly recommend you grab a copy of the fourth and final Tales of the Apt short fiction anthology from NewCon Press, because it also contains sterling work from authors such as Pete Newman, Frances Hardinge, Justina Robson and - writing the best piece in the book, for my money - Keris McDonald.  That story, and the collection itself, are called The Scent of Tears, and you can find it here.


After that, anything's going to seem a bit anticlimactic, but I do have a handful of new sales to report.  Even better, two of them are for new fiction, a prospect that was starting to seem increasingly remote for a while.  They're both older pieces that I've faithfully been trying to home for many a year now, too, which makes it all the more satisfying.  Cat and Mouse, a sci-fi parable based on my experiences in London - though, weirdly, written before I ever actually went to London - will be appearing in the Bubble Off Plumb anthology from Feral Cat Publishers at some not too distant point in the future.  And Glamorous Corpses, a thoroughly mean-spirited bit of cyberpunk that I wrote at work, in a job I despised, about eight years ago, is already out in new UK magazine Write Ahead / The Future Looms.  Then there's the most recent one, which since it happened this week I probably oughtn't to talk about, but I guess I can safely say that it's a pro sale to one of my absolutely favourite markets.

Oh, I nearly forgot!  I accidentally discovered that the The Living Dead anthology - containing my story Stockholm Syndrome - is available in a whole multitude of languages ... I think it's at least Spanish, Korean, and Russian, which is a fairly random selection, all told!  Editor John Joseph Adams was kind enough to chuck me over a copy of the Spanish edition, which looks great and does a commendable job of mistranslating both the city where I got my degree and my actual name.  Which makes me kind of want to learn Spanish to find out what other wacky misunderstandings are in there!  Anyway, that means I've now had work out in a total of at least five languages that aren't English, and isn't that a nice note to end on?

Twitcher Up At Pseudopod

At the risk of repeating what I just said in that wholly unimaginative title, my zombie story Twitcher is now up at the world's favourite horror podcast site, Pseudopod, introduced by the marvelous Alasdair Stuart and read in fine style by Roberto Suarez. 

When Pseudopod asked me for a fact to share with their listeners, I mentioned that the title was a fortuitous gift.  I'd recently finished the story and was having lunch with my then-manager, who asked me why I was staring out of the window.  Not wanting to point out that I found his conversation deathly dull, I told him I'd been watching a bird hopping about, at which point he asked me, "you're not a twitcher, are you?"  I replied that I wasn't, and indeed hadn't a clue what a twitcher was.  When he explained that it was another word for bird-watcher, brain-gears clicked satisfyingly into place.  My story, then called "Little Red Wing" in a nod to one of my favourite Tanya Donelly songs, had a new name, and it was perfect.

What I didn't mention, because it was something I'd forgotten until I listened to the story just now, was that Twitcher started life as a dream.  In the dream, it was vampires and not zombies, but the basic elements - a bird-watcher guarding over rare red birds whilst the world went all to hell around him - were all there.  True fact: for all the hundred times that dreams are weird and disturbing and generally horrible mind-vomit, there's always one you can recycle into a short story.

You can listen to Twitcher here.   It's positively, absolutely the last zombie story I'm going to write, because we're all bored sick of zombies by now, right?  And this makes three now, one of which was my first sale to Pseudopod, thinking about it.  But hey, if you're going to listen to one David Tallerman zombie story this year, make it this one, because it's weird and catastrophically bleak and I'm rather proud of it.

Third Sale to Pseudopod

Yes!  Pseudopod have indeed joined the tiny but worthy pantheon of markets to have accepted more than one or two of my submissions, having just now followed their purchases of Stockholm Syndrome and Prisoner of Peace with my zombie-story-with-almost-no-zombies-in-it Twitcher.   Yup, very few zombies indeed, but an awful lot of bird watching - as the title suggests - and no that's not a metaphor or a crude pun or something, it really is absolutely a zombie story about bird watching.  Possibly the first and quite probably the last, but I wrote it and Pseudopod have accepted it and that, as the saying goes, is that.

Anyway, what was especially nice about this particular sale is that it ended a quite staggering run of rejections.  I'm sure I've discussed this before*, but there are times when spells of short story rejections (and by the same measure, I suppose, spells of acceptances) seem to make absolutely no sense whatsoever.  Thanks to the might stats-providing majesty of Duotrope's Digest I can say with confidence that my acceptance ratio towards the end of October was above 13%, the highest it's ever been, and that nearly six months and maybe sixty submissions later it was sitting at less than half that.

Now experience has taught me not to worry too much and that it all balances out in the end, but what I find myself wondering is, how does this happen?  How can you be one minute comfortably selling a story a month and then going for six months without a sniff of interest?  I can think of any number of factors, but most of them would depend on me - the types of stories I was submitting, the markets I picked, the regularity with which I sent work out - and as far as I can tell my behaviour is fairly consistent.  To the best of my knowledge I haven't spent the last six months submitting crappy work or picking wildly inappropriate markets or accidentally sending out my shopping list.

Maybe the problem is that I'm looking for micropatterns when I should be looking for macropatterns.  Maybe I'm just a crappy judge of my own work.  (I'm not.)  Maybe the universe is a crazy, random place and the publishing industry is an even more crazy, random place and we're all just like dust motes in a beam of sunlight. 


No!  I believe in order, damn it, and there must be some logic here.  There must be!

But for the life I me I can't see it...




* I did and it was here.

Signs and Nightmares

One of my regrets this year is that I've been so busy with novels and other big projects that not have I not been able to write any new short stories, I haven't even had time to send out the ones I've already written.  In fact, until recently, the closest I've come is editing some of the backlog I've been stockpiling over the last four years.

That's changed a bit in the last couple of months, with the first draft of Prince Thief done and dusted, and the extra hard work of beginning to tout some twenty stories began to pay off last week, when John Joseph Adams accepted my The Sign in the Moonlight for his new horror webzine Nightmare.  Considering that my first sale to John, Stockholm Syndrome, appeared in the World Fantasy Award nominated anthology The Living Dead, and my second was Jenny's Sick, published in Lightspeed during its multi-Hugo nominated first year, I've got to admit I have some hopes and expectations for this one.

As for The Sign in the Moonlight itself, I'm sure I'll talk about it plenty when it comes out.  For the moment, suffice to say that it was one of the most satisfying but also bizarre writing experiences I've ever had.  Acting completely out of character, I did a ton of research - into Alesteir Crowley, rock climbing, Tibet and the mountain of Kanchenjunga, amongst other things - and the stuff I came up with was almost too perfect for the tale I wanted to tell ... so much so that I got quite spooked before I was done.  Then, once it was finished, I weirded myself out even more when I discovered that the final word count was 5555; an odd coincidence given how significantly and often the number five occurs throughout the story.

(Go on, just guess how many points that sign in the title has!)

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.

The Living Dead ... the Movie!

I just discovered that the The Living Dead anthology I was in back in 2008 has a trailer.  It's extremely cool - especially the zombie schoolkids. Click here to watch on YouTube.

I also discovered I have a couple more stories out, but since neither is 'officially' out I'll hold off posting the details for a little while.

Now, I really should stop playing on the internet and get back to writing Funland.  36'699 words and counting...

News, Reviews, Odds and Sods

Just a few bits and pieces I wanted to mention while I remember...

First up, I finally have my copy of Necrotic Tissue #9 - with my Caretaker in the Garden of Dreams as editor's pick - and am currently wearing my entirely stylish Necrotic Tissue T-shirt, which by the way I fully intend to wear to FantasyCon if I manage to make it this year.  Anyway ... I can't recommend these guys enough.  NT is gloriously lurid and pulpy in design, and I'm looking forward to digging into it.  Also, Caretaker got a fantastic accompanying illustration, and I've mentioned before how excited I get by being fantastically illustrated.

As a tenuous tie-in, NT #9's cover is by the hugely talented Nick Rose, who was recently interviewed on Diabolical Plots, which is fifty-percent the home of David Steffen, who recently commented here at Writing on the Moon and mentioned that he'd listed Stockholm Syndrome in his top ten of Pseudopod.  Which is quite an honour, really, given how much great stuff Pseudopod have put out.  You can see the full list here.

Last up, I found a review of the Zombonauts anthology, and while it doesn't mention my Fear of a Blue Goo Planet I thought I'd post it to back up my comments from a couple of posts ago.  I think Jay's review is spot on, and although I'm only about half way through I'd pick out Amanda C. Davis's Two Things as a favourite too - some lovely, witty writing there, and a slyly understated ending.

Second Try for The Burning Room

A couple of bits of news this week, I'll get to the other one over the weekend. First up, I'm immensely pleased to announce that new professional-rate market Bull Spec have picked up my ghost story The Burning Room, which has been languishing ever since short-lived magazine The Willows accepted it and then promptly expired.

Harking back to my last post, the version that finally got okayed is some 500 words longer than the one that would have appeared back then. Editor Sam Montgomery-Blinn felt that the end was lacking a certain something and asked for a couple more lines, and me being me, I got a little carried away. It's easily done when there's the promise of being paid by the word, and it's a lucky coincidence that the new ending is a huge improvement.

I guess it's always a gamble staking work on a new publisher, but I've been hugely impressed by the passion and enthusiasm Sam's shown, both in regards to my own tale and on the Bull Spec blog. So while it would be kind of appropriate that The Burning Room should be cursed to never see the light of day, I'm hoping it's going to have a bit more luck this second time out.

Lastly, here's yet another glowing review of The Living Dead that picks out Stockholm Syndrome for special comment. Cheers to The Cimmerian for the thumbs up.

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.

Stockholm Syndrome Pays its Way and Then Some

On Wednesday I received my first royalty payment for The Living Dead anthology, published last year by Night Shade Books - which coincidentally was my first royalty payment full stop. I can't go into exact details, for a number of reasons, but suffice to say it was rather more than I was expecting. I've since had a brief e-chat with editor John Joseph Adams, who let me in on the exact sales figures. Again, I should probably keep them under my hat, and will say simply that The Living Dead has sold amazingly well, and continues to do so.

I'd like to lay all the credit for this at the door of my entry, Stockholm Syndrome - which if you're too cheap to buy the book you can read here or listen to in podcast here - but I guess that some of it has to go to that Stephen King bloke, and all the other great authors assembled therein. But mainly I think the blame for its absurd success lies with Mr Adams, for putting together such an inspired collection and then backing it to the hilt. Congratulations to him, to all the other authors, and to Night Shade, who I suspect will be rather pleased with its performance. Here's hoping it continues to find, entertain and gross out new readers well into the next decade.

June Reviews

I linked a couple of weeks back to a review of Space and Time # 107 that was less than complimentary about my story In the Service of the Guns. Thankfully, a recent trawl revealed a few more generous comments on my stories.

Taking In the Service first, this review from SFRevu is considerably kinder to it than the last, and very positive about the issue as a whole.

Next up, SFCrowsnest features a thorough review of Murky Depths # 8, and has the following to say about my Peachy:

"A cat named 'Peachy' goes strangely still and quiet in David Tallerman's tale of how ordinary life can be interrupted by unimaginable disaster. The very ordinariness of everyday life allows the finale to stand out pointedly. Short but thoughtful."

Lastly, here's another reviewer picking out Stockholm Syndrome as a favourite from the Living Dead anthology.

The Living Dead review

I've been totally remiss in not posting Living Dead reviews here - there have been absolutely loads, and more than one have picked out Stockholm Syndrome for (generally positive) mention.

This review, however, is more thorough than most - and also names SS as a favourite. Largely on the back of the amount of gore, in fairness, but that's as good a reason as any to dig a zombie story, right?