...but then, it isn't all that long since things were ridiculous in a bad way.
According to the absurdly overcomplicated spreadsheet I've been using for six years or so now to track my submissions, the longest I've gone between short fiction sales is 202 days, or a little under seven months. However, since one of those publishers subsequently gave up the goat before putting out my story, that's a deceptive figure. Does an acceptance that doesn't actually lead to a published story count for an awful lot? Discounting that statistical anomaly then, the longest I've gone without a short fiction sale is a whopping 292 days.
To put that in some context, I submitted 103 stories during that period - a comparatively low number for me, but still a fair few. For a bit more context, I should mention that this lengthy and alarming drought happened fairly recently, between July of last summer and April of this one. My track record up until that point had been erratic, but I had a fair few sales behind me, many of them to professional and well-established semi-pro markets. The stories I was sending out were a blend of old and new, which is usually the case with me. I was submitting to a wide-ranging mix of recently established and long standing markets, including a few who'd taken my work before; again, nothing particularly unusual about that. All told, it was a fairly typical period - asides from the fact that the editors of the world seemed to have collectively decided to avoid my work like it was infected with rat cooties.
Then again, according to that selfsame spreadsheet, I've just now sold four stories in eight days. I've already raved about the ones to Andromeda Spaceways, Nil Desperandum and Dark Tales of Lost Civilisations, and I was happy and willing to accept that I'd met my good news quota for August by the point that new (and already-best-selling-on-Amazon) pro market Digital Science Fiction got back to me to say they'd like to take my Across the Terminator.
Which is, of course, fabulous news - and all the more so for coming on the back of so much other fabulous news. I seriously enjoyed the first issue of DSF, (which contained my Black Sun and can be purchased here should you have the urge), and I'm completely in awe of how they've comes out of nowhere to become one of the more impressive professional markets in little more than the blink of an eye.
But it does leave me wondering more than ever about the vicissitudes of this zany industry.
Average it all out, of course, and I definitely can't complain. And even during that phenomenal dry patch, it's not as if there weren't plenty of other good things going on - like, oh say, the run-up to the three book deal with Angry Robot. I realise there are bad times and good times in everything, and writing is no exception - to say the absolute least. I mean, comparing the highs and lows of my day job to the highs and lows of my writing career would be to put a line of gently rolling hills and valleys up against a crazy mountain range. No, I guess my point here is partly just "whee! I sold another story to Digital Science Fiction!" and partly, "man, there really isn't any way to make sense of this stuff."
So come on, fellow writer types ... is it just me? Or are these improbably compressed highs and months-long lows just par for the course? Can anyone beat that better-part-of-a-year-long run of rejections? Can any publishers offer wise words to explain all this apparent randomness? Is there a secret cabal involved? Are names pulled from hats? Is any of this to do with that time I sacrificed a raccoon to Stephen King?
Sunday, 21 August 2011
Wednesday, 17 August 2011
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.
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.
Saturday, 13 August 2011
Hard-Sell Story? Don't Despair...
I first wrote Hand That Feeds about ten years ago, maybe a little more. This was back in the days when my head was still full of all the insecurity-inducing craziness drummed into me by two back-to-back degrees in English Literature, so I was mostly trying to write serious and meaningful fiction about serious and meaningful things, with perhaps the occasional guiltily pleasurable genre story on the side.
Hand That Feeds fell hard in the first camp. It was about art and politics and big things like that. In fact, it's only two real characters were an artist and a politician. And needless to say, they didn't see eye to eye. It was also, in fairness to it and with the endless benefits of hindsight, not so bad. Probably wordy and riddled with run-on sentences, certainly less than subtle, but not what you'd actually call bad.
My then-girlfriend was less than impressed, however. She felt the fact that I'd set it in what appeared to be Communist Russia and presented the politician character less than favourably was an unjust dig against Russian Communism. Looking back, it's hard to say just where the "unjust" part came in, but this was back in the days when all criticism was gospel, however bewildering or unfair. I rewrote Hand That Feeds, replacing Russian names with French names, (rationalising this with some kind of off-page, alternate-history French Communist revolution), and heavily toning down the badness of the politician character. Slowly, what had originally been more or less a tirade transformed into something approaching a rational debate.
Lo and behold, Hand That Feeds became a slightly better story.
It's from this point, incidentally, that I trace my habit of writing fence-sitting fiction about big issues, a tendency I've grown rather fond and even proud of. It took me a long time to realise that didacticism wasn't for me, that there's much fun to be had in writing opinions and viewpoints you don't necessarily hold with (or even fervently despise) and seeing where it takes you. But I'm glad I did. Seriously, if you've never written a story on a subject you feel passionately about and then forced yourself into the head of the character you least agree with, give it a try. If you're anything at all like me, you might find you've hit one of the mother-lodes of what fiction writing's all about.
Anyway. Hand That Feeds kept living. Sometimes I'd give up on it for months at a time. Every few months, or even years, I'd pick at it. It got better - enough that I didn't want to give up on it. It got stranger, too. It had always been a little Kafkaesque, and the switch to an imaginary Communist France coupled with its flat refusal to take sides only heightened the strangeness. It got rejected. A lot. That was sort of okay, it was a very old, very odd story, after all. Sometimes it made me think that maybe I should just let it go. Sometimes - and always, in the end - it made me all the more determined to tidy it a little more and kick it out the door again.
Now, long story far from short, here we are and someone has finally agreed - ten years after I first conceived it - to pay me money for Hand That Feeds. That someone is Jim Phillips, producer of literary podcast Nil Desperandum, whose stated mission is to publish fiction that elucidates "Truth, Life, and the Human Condition." Whether or not that's what Hand That Feeds does it open to question, but I'm happy that to admit that I've spent way too long with this particular tale, so probably Jim gets it a heck of a lot better than I can do. After listening to a couple of the excellent episodes he's already put out, I'm definitely looking forward to seeing what he makes of my almost-oldest published story.
Had common sense prevailed, I'd have written off Hand That Feeds a long, long time ago. But isn't it sort of poetic that a story about art versus society should get to survive in defiance of all the usual logics of time versus profit? And then, after five years of rejection, end up in a 'zine called, of all things, Nil Desperandum? I mean, in that really silly sense of the word poetic that doesn't actually mean anything? Yeah ... I think it is.
Hand That Feeds fell hard in the first camp. It was about art and politics and big things like that. In fact, it's only two real characters were an artist and a politician. And needless to say, they didn't see eye to eye. It was also, in fairness to it and with the endless benefits of hindsight, not so bad. Probably wordy and riddled with run-on sentences, certainly less than subtle, but not what you'd actually call bad.
My then-girlfriend was less than impressed, however. She felt the fact that I'd set it in what appeared to be Communist Russia and presented the politician character less than favourably was an unjust dig against Russian Communism. Looking back, it's hard to say just where the "unjust" part came in, but this was back in the days when all criticism was gospel, however bewildering or unfair. I rewrote Hand That Feeds, replacing Russian names with French names, (rationalising this with some kind of off-page, alternate-history French Communist revolution), and heavily toning down the badness of the politician character. Slowly, what had originally been more or less a tirade transformed into something approaching a rational debate.
Lo and behold, Hand That Feeds became a slightly better story.
It's from this point, incidentally, that I trace my habit of writing fence-sitting fiction about big issues, a tendency I've grown rather fond and even proud of. It took me a long time to realise that didacticism wasn't for me, that there's much fun to be had in writing opinions and viewpoints you don't necessarily hold with (or even fervently despise) and seeing where it takes you. But I'm glad I did. Seriously, if you've never written a story on a subject you feel passionately about and then forced yourself into the head of the character you least agree with, give it a try. If you're anything at all like me, you might find you've hit one of the mother-lodes of what fiction writing's all about.
Anyway. Hand That Feeds kept living. Sometimes I'd give up on it for months at a time. Every few months, or even years, I'd pick at it. It got better - enough that I didn't want to give up on it. It got stranger, too. It had always been a little Kafkaesque, and the switch to an imaginary Communist France coupled with its flat refusal to take sides only heightened the strangeness. It got rejected. A lot. That was sort of okay, it was a very old, very odd story, after all. Sometimes it made me think that maybe I should just let it go. Sometimes - and always, in the end - it made me all the more determined to tidy it a little more and kick it out the door again.
Now, long story far from short, here we are and someone has finally agreed - ten years after I first conceived it - to pay me money for Hand That Feeds. That someone is Jim Phillips, producer of literary podcast Nil Desperandum, whose stated mission is to publish fiction that elucidates "Truth, Life, and the Human Condition." Whether or not that's what Hand That Feeds does it open to question, but I'm happy that to admit that I've spent way too long with this particular tale, so probably Jim gets it a heck of a lot better than I can do. After listening to a couple of the excellent episodes he's already put out, I'm definitely looking forward to seeing what he makes of my almost-oldest published story.
Had common sense prevailed, I'd have written off Hand That Feeds a long, long time ago. But isn't it sort of poetic that a story about art versus society should get to survive in defiance of all the usual logics of time versus profit? And then, after five years of rejection, end up in a 'zine called, of all things, Nil Desperandum? I mean, in that really silly sense of the word poetic that doesn't actually mean anything? Yeah ... I think it is.
Wednesday, 10 August 2011
A Twist Too Far for Andromeda Spaceways
The last few days has seen such an almighty splurge of news that I'm almost at a loss where to start. Even convincing my brain to divide up the okay-to-discuss from the not-quite-there-but-potentially-awesome stuff is proving a struggle.
I have a vague memory of this happening at almost exactly the same time the year before last, which is probably an excellent argument for the validity of astronomy. The only rational explanation here is that every couple of years Mars knocks Jupiter out of Pisces, side-spinning Saturn off Venus and shunting Scorpio into the ascendant, and tons of exciting writing stuff happens for a period of roughly a week.
I mean, really. That's the only rational explanation. Any other explanation you can think of is just crazy.
So anyway, in the interests of similtaneously hammering home the fact that there are suddenly lots of interesting things going on and not having to write a really long post when it's rapidly approaching my bedtime, I'll just blat* on about these multifarious developments as and when I can, in whatever spurious order my rapidly fading memory tells me they happened in. And hey, maybe by the time I get to the last thing, another thing will have happened and this blog will finally become a self-sustaining entity. Maybe it'll even start writing itself. That would be neat.
Right. As far as I can remember, and side-stepping the profoundly exciting things I can't talk about, it all began when I picked up my third acceptance from Australia's premier genre publication, Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine. This was particularly cheering because Andromeda Spaceways is one of my favourite magazines around; I'm always impressed by what the ASIM collective are doing, and every time I check in I'm impressed that little bit more. And it was made that bit better by discovering that it's going to be my second time with writer / editor David Kernot in the ASIM captain's chair, since David also happens to be one of my favourite editors, not least because twice now he's accepted weird and screwed-up stories for a 'zine that tends towards fare of a lighter nature.
My last ASIM sale, The Painted City, way back in issue #43, has a scene - one mostly implied and off-page, admittedly - where one of the main characters basically drowns in their own melting, disease-infested face. And that wasn't even a horror story. Whereas acceptance number three, A Twist Too Far, is definitely a horror story, and has a scene that I fervently hope is just as nasty as that face-melting stuff. I mean, it's a Lovecraftian (or maybe Doyleian) tale of competing turn-of-the-century contortionists ... how well is that going to end?
Next post: whatever thing happened after this thing! Unless some other more urgent thing happens in the meantime!
* This is actually really a word.
I have a vague memory of this happening at almost exactly the same time the year before last, which is probably an excellent argument for the validity of astronomy. The only rational explanation here is that every couple of years Mars knocks Jupiter out of Pisces, side-spinning Saturn off Venus and shunting Scorpio into the ascendant, and tons of exciting writing stuff happens for a period of roughly a week.
I mean, really. That's the only rational explanation. Any other explanation you can think of is just crazy.
So anyway, in the interests of similtaneously hammering home the fact that there are suddenly lots of interesting things going on and not having to write a really long post when it's rapidly approaching my bedtime, I'll just blat* on about these multifarious developments as and when I can, in whatever spurious order my rapidly fading memory tells me they happened in. And hey, maybe by the time I get to the last thing, another thing will have happened and this blog will finally become a self-sustaining entity. Maybe it'll even start writing itself. That would be neat.
Right. As far as I can remember, and side-stepping the profoundly exciting things I can't talk about, it all began when I picked up my third acceptance from Australia's premier genre publication, Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine. This was particularly cheering because Andromeda Spaceways is one of my favourite magazines around; I'm always impressed by what the ASIM collective are doing, and every time I check in I'm impressed that little bit more. And it was made that bit better by discovering that it's going to be my second time with writer / editor David Kernot in the ASIM captain's chair, since David also happens to be one of my favourite editors, not least because twice now he's accepted weird and screwed-up stories for a 'zine that tends towards fare of a lighter nature.
My last ASIM sale, The Painted City, way back in issue #43, has a scene - one mostly implied and off-page, admittedly - where one of the main characters basically drowns in their own melting, disease-infested face. And that wasn't even a horror story. Whereas acceptance number three, A Twist Too Far, is definitely a horror story, and has a scene that I fervently hope is just as nasty as that face-melting stuff. I mean, it's a Lovecraftian (or maybe Doyleian) tale of competing turn-of-the-century contortionists ... how well is that going to end?
Next post: whatever thing happened after this thing! Unless some other more urgent thing happens in the meantime!
* This is actually really a word.
Sunday, 7 August 2011
Ten Things the Small Press Can Do As Well (Or Better) Than the Professional Press, Part 6: Availability
Of all the posts in this interminable series, I suspect this one has the most potential to wind someone, somewhere up. Not, I hasten to add, that that's my intention. Really. It isn't. But there are certain subjects that tend to make almost everyone a little edgy - and none more so than money.
But what the hell! Let's just come out and say it. Just because your independent science-fiction magazine is independent, that doesn't mean I should have to hock my kidneys to be able to afford a copy. Just because your anthology of vegetable-themed horror stories is coming from a small press, that doesn't excuse it costing three times as much as the average book. Small Press does not equate to "license to print money" - let alone "license to print money in a horribly inefficient fashion that involves pre-schoolers, potato halves and poster paint."
Part of the problem here, undoubtedly, is Print on Demand. POD is the Pandora's Box of independent publishing - for while there's definitely hope at the bottom of it, you have to be willing to wade through a fair degree of horror to get there. I've seen POD-printed magazines retail for more than I'd expect to pay for a new book, and POD paperback anthologies go for more than I'd consider forking over for a deluxe hardback.
I've not doubt that if I were to mention said preposterous costs to said publishers, they would fall back, in hugely offended fashion, on the in-turn horrendously unrealistic costs charged by organisations like Lulu and CreateSpace.
To which I'd say, "Rubbish. You're just doing in wrong."
Then we'd probably have one of those fights that only two people with absolutely no degree of martial prowess can have - likely there's be hand-waving and arm-flapping, and maybe someone would end up with a slightly bloodied nose. But throughout it all, I'd know I had the moral high ground. Because I've been taking a serious interest in POD these last couple of years. I've worked out, for example that - if you do it right - it's cheaper to run off proofreader copies of your latest novel by POD than it is to churn them out through the average home printer. If you do it right. Heck, get it really right, and you can run off a novel length book for about the price of ... well, a novel length book. Or an anthology for only a little more than what the average punter would expect to pay for an anthology.
Lest I cause unnecessary irritation - and I think this is a topic where there may be such a thing as necessary irritation - I should probably say here that, yes, I do totally get that there are constraints on the small press that drum prices up in a way that larger publishers can sidestep. What I'm saying is, that isn't an excuse to charge the first (or for that matter, the biggest) number that comes into your head. A few overheads are unavoidable. Many aren't. If you prep your Lulu-published anthology by merrily accepting the default options then sure, the resulting tome will cost about the same as a black-market Kalashnikov. But take the time to test out different combinations of format and paper stock, have a look at the handful of markets that have managed to really make POD work to their advantage, and you might just find you've shaved 50% or more off that first, preposterous price. To tie this back to the alleged theme of this series: POD has the scope to be the great leveller between small and professional press - if it's done right.
This is a theme I'll come back to in other posts - because it really is an area in which the small press can meet or even beat the pros - but it all starts here, with putting out a product that people can a) afford and b) actually get their hands on. Cost plays a huge part in that, but these days, there are plenty of other factors too. It's fine and commendable to put out a Kindle version of your magazine, but what about the many other file formats out there? Sure, conversion can be a hassle, but cover all bases and you automatically double or even triple your potential readership. Or, to put it another way, confine yourself to .pdf, say, and you immediately - and needlessly - lose countless readers who would be jumping at your product if they could only read it in a fashion that suited them on their device of choice.
One of the absolute best things any editor can do for a writer is to make their work as available as possible to as many people as possible. For that matter, of course, it's also one of the best things they can do for themselves. When it comes to electronic publication, that's an absolutely level playing field; for print, the steadily-declining costs of POD are going a long way to changing the game in favour of the small press. But that only works if you're willing to delve into its intricacies, rather than blundering into its many pitfalls.
But what the hell! Let's just come out and say it. Just because your independent science-fiction magazine is independent, that doesn't mean I should have to hock my kidneys to be able to afford a copy. Just because your anthology of vegetable-themed horror stories is coming from a small press, that doesn't excuse it costing three times as much as the average book. Small Press does not equate to "license to print money" - let alone "license to print money in a horribly inefficient fashion that involves pre-schoolers, potato halves and poster paint."
Part of the problem here, undoubtedly, is Print on Demand. POD is the Pandora's Box of independent publishing - for while there's definitely hope at the bottom of it, you have to be willing to wade through a fair degree of horror to get there. I've seen POD-printed magazines retail for more than I'd expect to pay for a new book, and POD paperback anthologies go for more than I'd consider forking over for a deluxe hardback.
I've not doubt that if I were to mention said preposterous costs to said publishers, they would fall back, in hugely offended fashion, on the in-turn horrendously unrealistic costs charged by organisations like Lulu and CreateSpace.
To which I'd say, "Rubbish. You're just doing in wrong."
Then we'd probably have one of those fights that only two people with absolutely no degree of martial prowess can have - likely there's be hand-waving and arm-flapping, and maybe someone would end up with a slightly bloodied nose. But throughout it all, I'd know I had the moral high ground. Because I've been taking a serious interest in POD these last couple of years. I've worked out, for example that - if you do it right - it's cheaper to run off proofreader copies of your latest novel by POD than it is to churn them out through the average home printer. If you do it right. Heck, get it really right, and you can run off a novel length book for about the price of ... well, a novel length book. Or an anthology for only a little more than what the average punter would expect to pay for an anthology.
Lest I cause unnecessary irritation - and I think this is a topic where there may be such a thing as necessary irritation - I should probably say here that, yes, I do totally get that there are constraints on the small press that drum prices up in a way that larger publishers can sidestep. What I'm saying is, that isn't an excuse to charge the first (or for that matter, the biggest) number that comes into your head. A few overheads are unavoidable. Many aren't. If you prep your Lulu-published anthology by merrily accepting the default options then sure, the resulting tome will cost about the same as a black-market Kalashnikov. But take the time to test out different combinations of format and paper stock, have a look at the handful of markets that have managed to really make POD work to their advantage, and you might just find you've shaved 50% or more off that first, preposterous price. To tie this back to the alleged theme of this series: POD has the scope to be the great leveller between small and professional press - if it's done right.
This is a theme I'll come back to in other posts - because it really is an area in which the small press can meet or even beat the pros - but it all starts here, with putting out a product that people can a) afford and b) actually get their hands on. Cost plays a huge part in that, but these days, there are plenty of other factors too. It's fine and commendable to put out a Kindle version of your magazine, but what about the many other file formats out there? Sure, conversion can be a hassle, but cover all bases and you automatically double or even triple your potential readership. Or, to put it another way, confine yourself to .pdf, say, and you immediately - and needlessly - lose countless readers who would be jumping at your product if they could only read it in a fashion that suited them on their device of choice.
One of the absolute best things any editor can do for a writer is to make their work as available as possible to as many people as possible. For that matter, of course, it's also one of the best things they can do for themselves. When it comes to electronic publication, that's an absolutely level playing field; for print, the steadily-declining costs of POD are going a long way to changing the game in favour of the small press. But that only works if you're willing to delve into its intricacies, rather than blundering into its many pitfalls.
Sunday, 31 July 2011
Passive Resistance Sold to Redstone ... and Other Excitements
I mentioned a looooong time ago that my cyberpunk-for-people-who-can't-work-computers story Passive Resistance had been picked up for an anthology, the title of which escapes me, by a publisher called Mythica Publishing. Well, that was one bit of excitingness that fell flat on its face, what with Mythica turning out to be the kind of unscrupulous self-publishing type outfit that couldn't put out an anthology if ten thousand copies of it materialised from nowhere and proceeded to sell themselves to an unsuspecting public.
Which seemed like bad news at the time. What I obviously couldn't have predicted is that it was in fact completely brilliant - since if Mythica hadn't keeled over like a geriatric donkey, I couldn't have just sold Passive Resistance to Redstone Science Fiction. Since Mythica were planning to pay me precisely nothing, (and would probably have picked my pockets given half the chance), and Redstone just gained their SFWA professional market pointy magic hat, it's hard to see this as any other than a profoundly lucky escape. Which, funnily enough, is precisely one of the things that Passive Resistance is about. At times like this, it almost feels like the universe isn't a big chaotic bubble of meaningless crazy!
In other news ... I knew on a vague intellectual level that there was probably going to be a Lightspeed Year One anthology, including my Jenny's Sick, but the discovery that it was both real and a mere four months away still set me bouncing round the room like a trained seal. Halfway through the day, it struck me that a significant percentage of that excitement came not from the promise of more exposure for what I consider one of my better stories, but from the prospect that I'd be spending my Christmas holiday reading a year's worth of fiction from Lightspeed. Of the many 'zines out there, it's high on my list of ones I wish I had the time to follow, so I can't help but look forward to the prospect of catching up on twelve months worth of Lightspeed goodness.
Lastly - and only leastly in that it doesn't directly involve anyone paying me money - I discovered yesterday that Digital Science Fiction's issue #1 anthology First Contact (which included my Black Sun) recently hit the number one sales spot in Amazon's science fiction anthologies kindle list, and is still riding high in the top ten. Hats off to DSF for not only putting out an excellent first issue but for actually managing to persuade a sizeable number of people to read it.
Which seemed like bad news at the time. What I obviously couldn't have predicted is that it was in fact completely brilliant - since if Mythica hadn't keeled over like a geriatric donkey, I couldn't have just sold Passive Resistance to Redstone Science Fiction. Since Mythica were planning to pay me precisely nothing, (and would probably have picked my pockets given half the chance), and Redstone just gained their SFWA professional market pointy magic hat, it's hard to see this as any other than a profoundly lucky escape. Which, funnily enough, is precisely one of the things that Passive Resistance is about. At times like this, it almost feels like the universe isn't a big chaotic bubble of meaningless crazy!
In other news ... I knew on a vague intellectual level that there was probably going to be a Lightspeed Year One anthology, including my Jenny's Sick, but the discovery that it was both real and a mere four months away still set me bouncing round the room like a trained seal. Halfway through the day, it struck me that a significant percentage of that excitement came not from the promise of more exposure for what I consider one of my better stories, but from the prospect that I'd be spending my Christmas holiday reading a year's worth of fiction from Lightspeed. Of the many 'zines out there, it's high on my list of ones I wish I had the time to follow, so I can't help but look forward to the prospect of catching up on twelve months worth of Lightspeed goodness.
Lastly - and only leastly in that it doesn't directly involve anyone paying me money - I discovered yesterday that Digital Science Fiction's issue #1 anthology First Contact (which included my Black Sun) recently hit the number one sales spot in Amazon's science fiction anthologies kindle list, and is still riding high in the top ten. Hats off to DSF for not only putting out an excellent first issue but for actually managing to persuade a sizeable number of people to read it.
Thursday, 28 July 2011
One Sale, a Couple of Reviews
Just when it seemed that things were quieting down and all the eventful stuff for the year was done with, a couple of bits of good news and some other interesting odds and sods appeared to enliven my week.
Actually, that's a small fib, in that the particular bit of good news I'm typing about now arrived a week or two ago, but there were a couple of contractual doodads I wanted to clarify, and now that they're clarified I think it's okay to consider it a new bit of good news all over again. The long and the short of it is that once print-zine, soon to be webzine Kaleidotrope have picked up my languishing horror story Fall From Grace.
As I whimpered about here, Fall was going to appear in an exciting anthology from Northern Frights Publishing until Northern Frights enigmatically imploded. That was decidedly sad, because they were great and so would the anthology have been, but from my point of view at least, it's cheering that Fall has found a new home so quickly. And what a home! Kaleidotrope introduces itself with the line, "...if you dig Martians, robots, and people with melting heads...", and who doesn't dig those things? I mean seriously, who? Find me the man or woman who doesn't dig those things and I'll tweak your ear and call you a liar.
Elsewhere and elsewise, I stumbled over a couple of reviews / write-ups of my stories that had somehow slipped under my radar. Firstly, SFSite had some fairly positive things to say about The Burning Room, as published in Bull Spec:
In "The Burning Room" by David Tallerman, Miss Taversham is boarding in an attic room, and her landlady Mrs. Faraday whose odd behaviour is of deep interest to her as she surveys the room she will stay in for awhile. Mrs Faraday hides a secret about this particular room, though, and the new tenant must find out more about it, or risk losing her sanity. "The Burning room" is a haunting tale that seems to linger in the mind long after the reader moves onto another story.
Perhaps a bit more exciting - in that it really pins a few of the things I was trying to get at - is this extract on Jenny's Sick from Tangent's review of Lightspeed #7:
How do you stand out in a world where everyone is perfect? In “Jenny’s Sick” by David Tallerman, all disease has been eradicated, or so it would seem. When a college man intent on pursuing a career finds his roommate suffering from influenza, gastroenteritis, and other maladies, he discovers she’s been taking pills to make herself sick. He ignores her addiction and moves out rather than try to dissuade her from her self-afflicting tendencies. Troubled by guilt, can he find it in his heart to help his former lover and friend in her time of need, or will his life and career take precedence?
Science takes a back seat to the smooth prose and identifiable characters in “Jenny’s Sick.” Turn the disease-inducing drugs into modern illegal street drugs and the story wouldn’t change . . . much. But there is an underlying current that paints a scary picture of life where everyone can have a flawless body and the boundary between sane and insane is blurred. I recommend “Jenny’s Sick” based on the characters and its thought-provoking nature.
Many cheers to Rhonda Porrett for such a thoughtful commentary.
Actually, that's a small fib, in that the particular bit of good news I'm typing about now arrived a week or two ago, but there were a couple of contractual doodads I wanted to clarify, and now that they're clarified I think it's okay to consider it a new bit of good news all over again. The long and the short of it is that once print-zine, soon to be webzine Kaleidotrope have picked up my languishing horror story Fall From Grace.
As I whimpered about here, Fall was going to appear in an exciting anthology from Northern Frights Publishing until Northern Frights enigmatically imploded. That was decidedly sad, because they were great and so would the anthology have been, but from my point of view at least, it's cheering that Fall has found a new home so quickly. And what a home! Kaleidotrope introduces itself with the line, "...if you dig Martians, robots, and people with melting heads...", and who doesn't dig those things? I mean seriously, who? Find me the man or woman who doesn't dig those things and I'll tweak your ear and call you a liar.
Elsewhere and elsewise, I stumbled over a couple of reviews / write-ups of my stories that had somehow slipped under my radar. Firstly, SFSite had some fairly positive things to say about The Burning Room, as published in Bull Spec:
In "The Burning Room" by David Tallerman, Miss Taversham is boarding in an attic room, and her landlady Mrs. Faraday whose odd behaviour is of deep interest to her as she surveys the room she will stay in for awhile. Mrs Faraday hides a secret about this particular room, though, and the new tenant must find out more about it, or risk losing her sanity. "The Burning room" is a haunting tale that seems to linger in the mind long after the reader moves onto another story.
Perhaps a bit more exciting - in that it really pins a few of the things I was trying to get at - is this extract on Jenny's Sick from Tangent's review of Lightspeed #7:
How do you stand out in a world where everyone is perfect? In “Jenny’s Sick” by David Tallerman, all disease has been eradicated, or so it would seem. When a college man intent on pursuing a career finds his roommate suffering from influenza, gastroenteritis, and other maladies, he discovers she’s been taking pills to make herself sick. He ignores her addiction and moves out rather than try to dissuade her from her self-afflicting tendencies. Troubled by guilt, can he find it in his heart to help his former lover and friend in her time of need, or will his life and career take precedence?
Science takes a back seat to the smooth prose and identifiable characters in “Jenny’s Sick.” Turn the disease-inducing drugs into modern illegal street drugs and the story wouldn’t change . . . much. But there is an underlying current that paints a scary picture of life where everyone can have a flawless body and the boundary between sane and insane is blurred. I recommend “Jenny’s Sick” based on the characters and its thought-provoking nature.
Many cheers to Rhonda Porrett for such a thoughtful commentary.
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