I very much enjoy writing and reading flash fiction and this is the second time I have had a piece appear in Alien Skin (thanks guys). People often [...]]]>

Hot on the heels of my last publication announcement (see below) I bring you ‘The Shouter and the Chanter’ which is out now in Alien Skin.

I very much enjoy writing and reading flash fiction and this is the second time I have had a piece appear in Alien Skin (thanks guys). People often say that sci-fi (and fantasy) books are longer than other genre novels because the writer needs to spend so many words on world building. This is clearly not true and part of the skill of a good sci-fi writer is to embed the world building seamlessly into the rest of the story. There is no better way to practice this art than to write flash fiction.

With all this frantic editing and book publicising going on, I forgot to mention something very important to me. My short story, ‘All the Way’ has just been published in The Future Fire.

If you don’t know this magazine, you should probably download some of their PDF editions [...]]]>

Future Fire #18: More firsts

With all this frantic editing and book publicising going on, I forgot to mention something very important to me. My short story, ‘All the Way’ has just been published in The Future Fire.

If you don’t know this magazine, you should probably download some of their PDF editions and have a browse. The Future Fire deliberately aims to provide speculative fiction that explores social and political issues – my favourite kind!

I also hope you will pop across and read ‘All the Way’. Publishing this story is a significant milestone for me – not just because it is the first time I’ve had my name on a magazine cover, and not just because it is the first time a story of mine has ever been accompanied by specially-commissioned artwork, but because this is the second one of my Placid Point stories to be published.

Placid Point is a place in a future world I invented and in which I have set a number of short stories. ‘Murathera’s Orgy’, which appeared in the print anthology Masques earlier this year, is a story from the distant future and is actually set in Placid Point, a massive, orbiting space station, packed solid with computers, in which millions of people live as simulations.  ‘All the Way’ is from a point in time just sixty or so years from now, when the first uploaded humans are learning to adjust to their new situation. At this time, Placid Point is known as ‘Omega Point’ and doesn’t even get a mention.

However, Omega Point features prominently in the novel I am currently writing: ‘The Credulity Nexus’. If this book ever sees the light of day, it will be great to know that Masques and The Future Fire, paved its way.

A key piece of the future history of Placid Point – including the background of one of its main characters – is contained in an unpublished short story of mine called ‘JimsWorld’. There is also a short story called ‘Last Christmas’  – the winner of last year’s ‘Spec the Halls’ competition – which describes the very end of the story. Any magazine or anthology editors reading this who want to be a part of this unfolding saga, just drop me a line.

My short story,  ‘The Earth Ship’, is available now in a new anthology from Absent Willow Publishing, modestly titled, ‘The Best Horror, Fantasy and Science Fiction of 2009‘. Copies can be had from the publisher or on Amazon. The Absent Willow Review, which first published ‘The [...]]]>

'The Earth Ship' never looked so good.

My short story,  ‘The Earth Ship’, is available now in a new anthology from Absent Willow Publishing, modestly titled, ‘The Best Horror, Fantasy and Science Fiction of 2009‘. Copies can be had from the publisher or on Amazon. The Absent Willow Review, which first published ‘The Earth Ship’ claims to be the world’s fastest growing magazine featuring short fiction works of horror, fantasy, and science fiction. You’ll find their latest edition full of great, free fiction.

And, while I have your attention, I’m looking for volunteers to host my TimeSplash Blog Tour. If you have a blog and think your readers might be interested in hearing from me on the subject of my new book, or if you’d like to interview me about it, or something vaguely related, just let me know. I hope to find a number of blogs to include on my tour in March and April 2010. Don’t be bashful. It’s fun, it’s easy, you’d be doing me a big favour, and your readers might even enjoy it. You can find out more and contact me on the TimeSplash blog. Or you can reach me through the comments or the contact page on this blog.

The Concept Sci-fi Magazine 2009 Short Story Competition Special Edition is now avaialable online. It contains just three stories, the winner, “Bringer of War” by Iain Cairns, and the two runners-up; “Volume Control” by Matthew Fazakerly, and “Swan Song” by yours truly. Download it now and have a [...]]]>

Concept Sci-fi Magazine Issue #6

The Concept Sci-fi Magazine 2009 Short Story Competition Special Edition is now avaialable online. It contains just three stories, the winner, “Bringer of War” by Iain Cairns, and the two runners-up; “Volume Control” by Matthew Fazakerly, and “Swan Song” by yours truly. Download it now and have a great weekend read. It’s free!

Congratulations to Iain and many thanks to Gary Reynolds (Concept’s editor) and Sean Williams, who was the judge.

I’ve been trying to decide lately at what point being published for no fee counts as vanity publishing. A few of my recent publications have been in non-fee-paying magazines. I sent my work to them because I thought it would be an appropriate first step on the [...]]]>

Can you hear its siren call?

I’ve been trying to decide lately at what point being published for no fee counts as vanity publishing. A few of my recent publications have been in non-fee-paying magazines. I sent my work to them because I thought it would be an appropriate first step on the ladder to being paid for my work. (You may remember I blogged about this recently.) And I would still recommend this to other writers who are starting out. The editors I’ve dealt with have been intelligent, professional people who put a lot of work into helping me adjust my stories for their needs and, in the process, taught me a lot about writing for magazines and about how to work with editors. In fact, I have noticed no difference in the standards and professionalism of the ‘for-the-love’ editors and the ones who’ve paid me.

However, as I also noted, other writers have a completely different attitude. They target the highest-paying magazines first, then, on rejection, move to lower-paying magazines. Only when all paying markets are exhausted, will they send their work to non-paying magazines. Effectively, the non-paying mags are used as dumping grounds for stories they can’t sell. In which case, you have to ask yourself, why do they send their work to non-paying mags at all? Presumably, because it is better to have your story published, even for free, than to have it sitting forever on your hard drive. In other words, it’s a kind of vanity publishing.

Yet I’m pretty sure these same authors would baulk at the idea of actually paying someone to publish their work. That really would be beyond the pale. And it’s not such an odd reaction. After all, the free magazines do have standards – quite high ones. They do reject work – lots of it. So acceptance by a ‘for-the-love’ magazine is still a validation of the author as a writer. And the free magazines do still have wide circulations. Publication by those magazines still means the author’s work ‘gets out there’. But why is that better than leaving the story unpublished? Why is it that, when all else fails, writers would rather give their stories away to a magazine than to have them go unread?

It can only be vanity.

And here’s another interesting development I’ve noticed. Some authors have begun publishing their work directly as e-books. If you live in the USA, you can very easily self-publish a work as an e-book on Amazon and, for everybody else, you can do the same thing on Lulu. It is rumoured that Sony will introduce a similar service soon. It costs absolutely nothing and, for some, there is money to be made. These companies provide tools to support the author in formatting their books, designing covers,  and so on. The only expenses are getting an ISBN and registering your copyright (in the USA) and even an ISBN isn’t necessary to sell through Lulu.

Of course, there is no editorial selection at all. Anyone can publish anything this way. (Someone – and I forget who, unfortunately – said recently that the way to think of Lulu is as a photocopying service – a service it provides very well and at reasonable prices.) So maybe this is the next step for those authors who can’t sell their stories, and can’t get them accepted by the free magazines, but still want to get them out there. They can publish their work as e-books through these online services. It is still free. They still have not crossed that line and paid to be published.

How many will do it? How many will go there?

We already see the writers advice sites saying there are perfectly good reasons to self-publish (a family memoir, say, or a local history – the kind of books that commercial publishers won’t touch.) This is a distinct softening of the hard line that used to be drawn. Maybe the next softening will be to say it’s OK to self-publish if you have a work that is unpublishable for the reason that it has been rejected by every legitimate outlet. It seems unthinkable, but you never know, after all, commercial publishing is contracting and may well contract a lot farther over the next couple of years. Every month now, a few more magazines go bust, or are put ‘on hiatus’ as they wait for better times. The number of stories not finding a paying or even a non-paying outlet must be rising steadily. Stories that, last year would have been publishable, next year won’t be. What will happen to them all?

Watch this space.

I nearly made it to a Vision Writers’ Group meeting in Brisbane last week. I travelled 250 km especially for the event and then got the time of the meeting wrong! (Which [...]]]>

Just when I thought I was being smart and finally getting somewhere, I meet some fellow writers and have my confidence shaken.

I nearly made it to a Vision Writers’ Group meeting in Brisbane last week. I travelled 250 km especially for the event and then got the time of the meeting wrong! (Which led to 20 minutes of running around the State Library of Queensland trying to find a meeting room full of people I’ve never met before, who might just look like writers, because the State Library keeps no record of who has booked its rooms for what periods!)

Fortunately I owed one of the writers some money, so he hunted me down and directed me to a pub just a few blocks away where the remains of the meeting was winding down in the beer garden. I must say that it was 35 degrees C in Brisbane and the hygrometer stood at ‘soup’. So it took a couple of cold beers before I managed to cool down enough to enjoy the experience. But enjoy it I did – until the point where I mentioned that I’ve largely been submitting my stories to non-paying magazines.

My rationale for this is that I’m slowly building up to the high-paying mags, first by building a portfolio of published work in the non-paying markets, then moving up to the low-paying mags, then the mid-range ones, then the high-paying ones. It seemed like a good strategy to me and it’s been working out. I’ve been clocking up some publications, I’ve been getting the experience of working with editors, and my confidence in my publishability has been growing.

But no-one else does it that way, it seems. Everyone else starts by submitting to the highest-paying mag they can find, then, when they’re rejected, move down a tier, then down again, and so on until someone publishes their story. Given this, they had all supposed that I’d been rejected by every paying mag in the world or I wouldn’t have been published in non-paying mags! (Someone also said that they thought I was doing myself an injustice and that my work was easily good enough for at least the mid-range mags – bless  ‘em.)

So, do I change my strategy, or what? If I stick with what I’m doing, I’m pretty sure my bottom-up approach will get me there in the end. If I switch over to the top-down strategy, I might get there quicker – and I won’t have to endure people assuming I can’t hack it in the high-paying markets. It seems like a no-brainer, yet I can’t help feeling my ‘work your way up’ strategy has merit. Maybe it’s just my working-class background making me feel like I should serve an ‘apprenticeship’ before I can claim to be a trdesman.