Another year chalked off in our long run-up to the heat death of the universe making every achievement of humanity meaningless. Yes, Happy New Year to you too.
One of the more meaningless acts in the Dada farce we call life is, of course, the creation of fiction. A grown man, making up stories? Have you not seen the TV schedules, walked into a bookshop? There are more stories than any one person can absorb in a lifetime. And you want to create more?
Yes. Sorry. I know it doesn't make sense. But, occasionally, someone wants to buy them.
Regular readers will know my target is to sell three pieces, and to help that along in the year just departed I aimed to send out at least a piece a day. When I last set myself that objective the need to commute once a fortnight 400+ miles to London stymied the plan. Well, Covid made the need to continue up and down Britain's motorway system disappear, along with most of life's liberties, in the spring. Hence, not surprisingly, I managed 439 submissions (I may have gone a little scattershot nuts), with 283 flat 'no's' and 57 personal thoughts from editors, plus:
- Audit's Abacus, sold to Daily Science Fiction in January, appearing in May. This generated far more fan (e)mail than anything I've written previously and also another first - being approached by a venue for rights to podcast the story. For non-writers the difference may be subtle, but for a semi-pro writer having somebody come to them rather than constantly hawking your wares around the seedier parts of the internet is something of a red letter day.
- The Hypnotist sold to Hybrid Fiction in January, and appeared in their issue 2 in April. A 4,500-word sci-fi crime hybrid, it's one of my older stories that's been rewritten endlessly, hence I'm delighted that it's found a home.
- The Thirteenth Floor ended up appearing in Third Flatiron's Gotta Wear Eclipse Glasses anthology. A curious one this, as I wanted to submit to their collection of positive, uplifting sci-fi tales but, well, positive and uplifting isn't my writing style. So I just reversed one of my downbeat endings and tried to make it as internally plausible as possible. Even so, for one reviewer, the idea of morally good merchant bankers stretched sci-fi's credibility a tad too far...
- The Loimaa Protocol, a sale last year, made this year's Best of British Science Fiction. I'm genuinely proud of appearing in three of the last four - and several of those on this list are already with (if she's reading this) the wonderful, wonderful Donna Bond for consideration for next year's collection.
- The Button at the Base of His Spine, another reprint, was podcast on The Overcast after being picked up in June.
- Driverless, a tale of a sexually deviant and slight deranged driverless car, was picked up by Black Beacon Books in August and is scheduled for publication next year.
- Three Wishes, a flash tale of a day out with children gone strange, was accepted by Daily Science Fiction in early September and... well, I'm not sure. You see, I realised after a couple of months that I may not have responded to the contract offer and sent a sorry-sorry-sorry-yes-please email I've now been emailing - at a polite, non-hysterical frequency - for a couple of months now, and have not had a single response. But, I've also submitted and been rejected by DSF twice in that time. All very odd, and will continue to be odd until I get a quick email back saying all's well - or not...
- Felis Sarcasticus, previously blogged about, sold in October to Wyldblood and appeared a month later.
- The Moth, the first of three December sales, will appear in Wasatch Witches, an anthology from the Utah Chapter of the Horror Writers Association, with which I have precious little connection but wish them well.
- Snowball, a tale of cryptozoological mischief-making, will help launch Land Beyond the World sometime in 2021.
- Faivish the Imbecile, a tale of Frankenstein's monsters and 1970's Jewish New York tailors, was snapped up by the Quiet Reader between Christmas and the New Year, and will be on their site within days.
- ...and it's worth mentioning that May Nothing but Happiness Come Through Your Door, Camponotus Vampiricus, Tesla ♥ Waymo 4Ever, and The Artist and the Magician, sold in previous years, were all published in 2020.
Eleven pieces sold, only two reprints, 21,000 words of new material, and around half of those pieces going for decent semi-pro 6c a word or thereabouts rates. Given that I identified the need to sell longer pieces to better paying venues - I may have sold 17 pieces in the previous years, but 12 were either sub-1000 words, for token payment, or to flaky venues that never published - I think 2020 represents a decent stride forward. Perhaps my target for this year should be to stop submitting to the penny merchants, at least until I've exhausted all other possibilities for any given story.
Elsewhere, there's the continual sound of pieces bouncing off the transom. Two silver honorables and two unplaced was my tally at the Writer of the Future contest (idenitical to last year, oddly). For a long while, the Grinder showed my submission at Fantasy as being the oldest pending piece, before it was dismissed with a whimper rather than a bang. Analog, Daily Science Fiction, and the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction all had nice things to say about my stories, but not that they were running them. One got through the outer defences of Pseudopod but couldn't make it count with the editor. Last rounds and near misses were to be had at Flash Fiction Online, Paper Butterfly and NewMyths.com; a semi final place at the Cast of Wonders Flash Fiction competition. Of another tale, Curiouser said it was "a really strong piece... a well-paced and fascinating tale... and damn I loved the ending." Yep, that was a rejection, folks.
But, as ever, irons remain in fires. Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores have bounced back a story three times now with notes, with an invitation for a fourth and last attempt. I have easily the oldest yet-to-be-rejected submission at Electric Lit, albeit a venue the Grinder shows as never having accepted anything (?!). Sexy Fantastic Magazine asked for a full ms on the strength of a sample. Of the 57 outstanding submissions shown on the Grinder, fourteen are amber and seven red. Some of the blancmange is bound to stick.
Meanwhile, I think I know what you're thinking. When will this end? No, I mean, tell us about the novels.
I think it's telling that the report on short fiction sits front and centre. I had something of an epiphany when I broke off from Toefoot, my dark sci-fi thriller, to work on a 10,000-word Writers of the Future entry, then broke off from that to work on a 1000-word competition flash entry. I've never considered myself flighty, I'm happy to run marathons (or was), take on major projects, think at scale. I've already got a novel under my belt, so I know I have the legs to write another, so why can't I stick at it?
Too many ideas, I think. Too many ideas that work as short fiction, which can be turned out in a week or three. Too many sci-fi sketches rather than epic sweeps.
But an experience from July didn't help, when I lost the publisher of 2084, Double Dragon, when they folded, Covid being the last straw for what was essentially a one-man band. My first and final royalty payment? $2.13. That's about 0.0025 cents per word. Not even a coffee. Puts it all in context, doesn’t it?
The imprint was bought out by Fiction4all, which seemed to be dominated by porn when I did my due diligence on their offer of taking on 2084. Hence I republished it under my own William Holly imprint and it’s original, intended title in November (a proper ISBN! copy lodged with the British Library!!) with the sort of cover that I always wanted out of Double Dragon.
As for the publishing process (I'm a publisher! - a writer and a publisher!!), I'd already mapped the route out with my anthology of previously published stories, 24 0s & a 2, which dropped on to Amazon in May.
But as for my perennial objectives of completing a novel and selling a novel? Nothing happened with my Harry Potter-meets-Doctor Who YA SF thriller in 2020 other than my realising that it never was, and never will be the first part of a trilogy: it’s a good first two acts, but I’ve left my characters hanging, in need of another 30,000 words to return them to their rightful world. The pity is I’ve used up my opportunities with most of the obvious agents and publishers.
Otherwise, Toefoot is still lost in act 2, with each push forward getting diverted by the needs of everyday work and life, as well as the distraction of short fiction, but has pushed itself forward from 33,000 to 50,000 words, although that incorporates quite a lot of honing and rewriting, so it's not just 17,000 more words. I’ll finish them both in 2021 - honest - together with the usual minimum requirement of selling at least three new short stories. Perhaps I should set a minimum rate, say 3 cents a word?
Perhaps if I write them all down as targets I’ll be able to stick to them.
There. Looks like I just did.
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2084 - The Meschera Bandwidth
2084. The world remains at war.
In the Eurasian desert, twenty-year old Adnan emerges from a coma with memories of a strictly ordered city of steel and glass, and a woman he loved.
The city is the Dome, and the woman... is Adnan's secret to keep.
Adnan learns what the Dome is, and what his role really was within it. He learns why everybody fears the Sickness more than the troopers. And he learns why he is the only one who can stop the war.
Persuaded to re-enter the Dome to implant a virus that will bring the war machine to its knees, the resistance think that Adnan is returning to free the many - but really he wants to free the one.
24 0s & a 2
Twenty-four slipstream stories. Frequently absurd, often minimifidian, occasionally heroic.
